The Honey Trap
by Soldeed
Summary: While the Master plots and schemes in the depths of the TARDIS, the Doctor and Alison must trace an ancient evil to its source.  Betrayal leads to sacrifice, and nothing will be the same again.
1. Chapter 1

_Part 7 (!) of my Shalka-based series of stories. Those who don't know why an android copy of the Master is travelling with the Doctor will either have to read part 4 "The End of the World" or just take my word for it that there is a good reason._

**Chapter One**

Alison had a good feeling about this one.

She'd been past the swimming pool, up the colonnade, through the greenhouse, over a river of some liquid she assumed couldn't actually be treacle, into a glass tunnel with a breathless view of the stars, and down a wrought iron spiral staircase which, she was almost sure, should bring her to the door of the TARDIS wardrobe. After all this time she was finally getting the hang of the time machine's mysterious internal layout.

She clattered to the bottom of the stairs and took a cautious look around. It was a standard roundelled passageway, but the TARDIS passageways weren't normally this dark. After a moment's hesitation she set off to her left and thumped straight into something solid.

"Gah!"

She blurted out the involuntary expression of alarm at finding herself staring up into the Master's impassive bearded features and stumbled back out of arm's reach.

"What are you doing here?" she asked crossly.

The Master looked down at her unsmiling and linked his hands behind his back.

"Lurking," he said.

"I can see that, I..." She took another look around. "Is this not the wardrobe?"

"It is," said the Master, "about as far from the wardrobe as the human mind can conceive."

He strode forward to join her and she managed not to recoil when he took her by the elbow and turned her around to face the other way.

"Are you paying attention? You need to go down this corridor into a heptagonal room. There are eight doors in that room. Ignore all of them..."

"Please." Alison held up her hand as she felt her head start to swim. "It's okay, I'll go back the way I came and give it another go later. I can't hang about, the Doctor says we'll be arriving soon."

He released her and re-linked his hands behind his back.

"Arriving?" he queried.

"21st century Earth. I wanted to see my mum. Maybe Joe too, I don't know."

"Oh." He rolled back on his heels and cocked his head onto one side. "You're leaving us? I had no idea."

"I'm not leaving!"

His mock pained look made Alison stop and wonder why her voice had risen in pitch and volume to deny it. She soldiered on regardless.

"I'm just visiting home, what's wrong with that?"

"Oh, nothing at all, I simply observe that if you were as excited by the phenomenon of time travel as you once were, a renewal, however brief, of your previous humdrum existence would be the last thing on your mind."

Alison snorted, conscious that he was deliberately toying with her.

"Sorry to hurt your feelings. Didn't know you cared."

The Master smiled broadly, showing a flash of white teeth.

"Oh, don't concern yourself with my feelings, Miss Cheney. I should doubtless endure your absence with fortitude. The Doctor, on the other hand, is likely to take it to heart that you have grown weary of him."

"What?"

Her nose wrinkled in derision, but at the same time she couldn't help recalling the calm and reasonable manner in which the Doctor had acceded to her request for a visit home. Normally he would dismiss her ideas for where they should go next and claim he knew of a planet she'd never heard of which she would enjoy much more. She should have known. When the Doctor was polite to her it meant something was wrong.

"I won't pretend to understand," the Master continued smoothly in the silence she had left. "It's beyond me why you would want to return to your own drab little snippet of time and space when the Doctor can, as you once remarked, take you to see the pyramids being built..."

"If he ever gets around to it," she muttered without thinking, and regretted it as she saw the Master's eyes flicker with relish.

"Ahh..." he murmured with a smile. "That's it, of course. Feeling a little neglected and taken for granted? It's only natural, how long is it now since you first made that request?"

She drew breath for an answer, then bit down on it and tossed her hair back rebelliously.

"You know what? Screw it. I've known you too long to let you mess with my head for the fun of it. You'll have to get your kicks somewhere else today."

He inclined his head.

"Ah, Miss Cheney, you're too clever for me, I fear."

She gave him a suspicious look, half expecting that there would be some parting shot the instant she turned her back, but he just looked innocently back at her, or as innocently as his satanic appearance would allow. After a final glare she headed back up the spiral staircase, pursued by nothing but an eerie silence.

The Master watched her go. Once her footsteps had receded along the tunnel above, a figure emerged from the shadows behind him.

"Are we suspected, Master?"

The speaker was a tall, hard-faced, strongly-built man in a well-fitted military uniform, but when he spoke his voice quavered and he dipped his shoulders in a subservient crouch. He crept near like an ill-treated dog.

The Master didn't look round, his eyes resting on the staircase up which Alison had disappeared.

"No, Firman, I suspect her coming so close to stumbling on our little secret was a simple coincidence, unless she has learned to dissemble with frightening skill. Let us hope so. The Doctor is fond of her and it would distress me to have to order you to kill her."

The Doctor was circling the console making final adjustments as the control column rose and fell. He glanced up with a frown at Alison's appearance.

"Oh, I thought you were going to change. Weren't you headed for the wardrobe?"

She held up a hand and shook her head.

"Don't start. So, are we there yet?"

He looked back at the instruments.

"Just about. Earth, England, 2004. Not what I'd call a vintage year, but as requested."

Alison hesitated, still uncertain if there was something unnatural in his manner or if it was all something the Master had planted in her imagination.

"I just want to see my mum, you know? I'll only be a couple of hours."

He was scanning the readouts intently and it was a moment before he glanced up.

"Yes, I know. You said."

The column slid down into the console top, the lights dimming and the hum of power fading. The Doctor straightened, looking pleased with himself.

"There. Inch perfect." He reached for his bulky black coat on the hat stand. "Right, let's go. Have you considered who you're going to tell her I am?"

Alison hadn't. The truth was, in her mind, she had seen herself going to visit her mother alone. She bought some time by pushing forward the door control and heading for the exit to check whether the Doctor really had brought her to the right place. She sniffed a fresh cool sea breeze and blinked in the light of a clear blue sky and her spirits rose. She was home.

"Demons!"

She jumped and found herself standing face to face with the wide eyes and bloodless skin of a thickset, bearded man in a worn leather jerkin, rough iron tools hanging from his belt. He stared at her, his eyes flicking from her face to her clothes, to the TARDIS exterior and over her shoulder to the interior, his panic building up by the second till he burst out again:

"Demons! Witches! Black magic! Monsters risen from the bowels of hell!"

He tore himself away and fled across the grass till he plunged into the trees and was lost to view in a crashing tangle of branches.

Alison folded her arms and slowly rolled her eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

"He was not from the middle ages."

"He was! I swear."

"This is 2004. I've double checked."

"Why can't you just admit when you're wrong? This is supposed to be my neighbourhood. Trust me, we never had guys in leather jerkins running around, they'd have had their heads kicked in."

The Doctor strode along, making her scurry to keep up, across the field in which the TARDIS had materialised towards the scrubby mass of hummocks at the far end.

"Try to understand, Alison, there are careless mistakes, navigational errors, technical hitches, and then there are physical impossibilities. If this is any earlier than about 1950, that would mean the entire timeline of this galactic sector has become twisted and is about to devour itself."

She hesitated, and he glared at her.

"No, it isn't! Because it's 2004, just as I said."

"Isn't it possible that you've just..."

"Alison, which of the two of us has a degree in six-dimensional physics?"

She held up her hands.

"Look, fine, whatever. I'm not going to argue about this. We'll soon see, won't we?"

They reached the hummocks and walked up the slope to look out at the landscape beyond. Alison didn't know whether to be relieved or dismayed.

She was standing on the verge of a modern tarmac road, a nondescript Toyota hatchback swooshing past into the distance. Beyond there was an agreeable-looking pub with people in modern dress clustered about the beer garden tables and a carpark filled with modern automobiles. A sign with a cheerful-looking winged lizard illustrated its name: The Green Dragon. She couldn't look round to see the self-satisfaction in the Doctor's face, but she could hear it plainly enough in his voice.

"Oh, look. It's a pre-renaissance carpark. It's good that the scourge of the black death didn't prevent them from pressing ahead with the development of the Range Rover. Shall we go inside? If they have satellite television perhaps we can catch the latest jousting scores and see what's top of the sackbut charts..."

Alison had to grit her teeth through the Doctor's extended gloat, but her spirits rose once they had darted through a gap in the traffic and onto the pub's grassy areas. It was nice here. Better than nice, actually, it was...

She glanced around. There were eight wooden tables here, spread out on the grass far enough apart to allow some space, close enough for a convivial atmosphere. The people were just regular people, mostly men, and the thing that struck her was that none of them were unhappy. None of them looked bored, or left out, or uncomfortable, or distracted. They laughed, smiled, drank and chatted, the bright golden sunshine illuminating their faces, the din of their conversation swirling together into a single cheery sound of celebration and contentment. It was, she realised normality. It was the way she remembered her home and her old life. It was devoid of disappointment or anticlimax. It was the way she remembered it when she missed it the most.

"Hi there! What can I get you?"

Alison jumped at the appearance of the waitress who seemed to appear out of nowhere, and couldn't help staring - the girl looked like a supermodel. Her caramel blonde hair tumbled round her shoulders, her wide blue eyes sparkled with friendly welcome, her flawless tanned skin was perfectly made up and glowing with health, her smile showed a row of shining white teeth, and her minimalist uniform of T shirt and shorts was tight about her sleek figure. Alison glanced around and realised there were a couple more just like her bring trays of fresh glasses to the tables. Not exactly like her, not like twins. But with the same movie star looks and effortless good cheer. They swayed between the tables, long legs gleaming, T shirts stretching, laughing at the customers' clumsy jokes and bending pertly to set the trays down.

Alison shook herself out of what she realised was becoming a resentful mood and glanced at the Doctor, who was surveying his surroundings with a detached interest.

"Do you even have money?" she asked.

He looked thoughtful.

"Just a minute."

He started sorting through a tangle of metal, plastic, stone and other diverse objects retrieved from the depths of his pockets, but the serving girl just widened her smile.

"That's okay," she said brightly. "The first drink's free! I'll bring you something nice."

Alison frowned after her as she disappeared through a heavy wood and glass door, into the darkened interior of the pub.

"Must be... some sort of promotion," she mumbled. "Maybe this place has just opened, they can't afford to employ models as waitresses all the time. Look at them!"

The Doctor was dropping the money, if that was what it was, carefully back into his coat pocket. Obediently he looked at the waitresses but she could tell he wasn't really aware of anything special about them. Before he could reply a high-pitched voice cut across him:

"Oh no... no... no!"

The bearded man in the primitive clothing who had fled when she opened the TARDIS doors stood on the fringe of the beer garden, staring around with terrified despair at the cars, the phone box, the thickly gathered strangers in their modern dress. He appeared on the verge of tears, looking wildly from side to side in search of a single thing which did not fill him with fear. After a few frozen seconds he gave a choking sob and turned to flee once more, pelting away across the carpark.

Everyone at the tables laughed.

"Bloody students," the nearest man remarked, shaking his head. "They just never get tired of that same old joke."

Alison glanced round for the Doctor, meaning to point out the man as the one she'd seen, and realised she couldn't find him. After a moment she spotted him slipping agilely between tables on the fugitive's trail. He threw an impatient look back at her.

"Come on Alison, after him!"

"Oh God."

She grimaced in annoyance, finding herself left behind yet again, but there was nothing for it but to tear after him and skid to a halt at his side. He stood in the carpark scanning the surrounding grassy verges and the tree line across the road.

"Do you see him, Alison?" he asked.

"What's up?" she protested. "What, you don't think he's a student like they said?"

"Not really," he replied, without turning round. "Authentic fourteenth century clothing and a trace of rickets in his gait seems a bit elaborate for a student prank. We have to find him before he injures himself. Or someone else."

Her heart rate rising as it came home to her that this was serious, Alison wheeled around, searching with her eyes, and pointed.

"There!"

They sprinted off side by side, hot on the trail of the man who was scrambling confusedly between two parked cars, squeamishly trying to avoid touching either of them. He didn't seem to recognise the wire mesh fence in front of him as something solid and ran right into it, clawing at it with his hands as if it were a giant spider web.

"Wait!" the Doctor called. "Stay there!"

It just panicked the man still more, and with a flailing explosion of energy, legs kicking in all directions, he succeeded in scrambling over the fence and tumbled down the grassy slope beyond. Alison's attention was seized by a roar of sound from the right, and her blood chilled as she realised what was at the bottom.

"Train!" she yelled. "Train!"

They crashed into the fence and stared down at the tiny, despairing figure picking himself up on the tracks and staring in dumbfounded terror at the vast, speeding monster bearing down upon him. Alison's mouth fell open, her boots frozen in place on the ground, her eyes locked on the sight, and the next instant a hand grasped her by the collar and spun her around. She felt the strength hidden in the Doctor's thin fingers as he pressed her face firmly into his coat, keeping her from seeing any more, but she heard the train's horn bellow and the screech of its wheels like meat mincers on the track.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

The Doctor stormed back towards the pub like an avenging angel, black coat flying back from his shoulders, face dark and hard as rock. Alison, her head buzzing and her legs quivering beneath her from shock, hurried along behind him.

"Now what?" she protested. "Where are we going?"

It's despicable!" he seethed through taut, pale lips. "Playing with time travel is bad enough, but to bring that man out of his own time... to dump him here and leave him alone and frightened..." He glowered at the tables and the seated drinkers and quickened his pace. "Someone's going to pay for this."

He strode up to the man who had spoken before, and just as Alison was about to push forward and do the talking before the Doctor could insult someone and get them thrown out, he spoke and as though he had clicked a switch in his head he was all sweetness and reason.

"Excuse me," he said with a pleasant smile. "I meant to ask before but I got distracted. Why did you say that man who ran by here earlier was a student? What made you think so?"

The man glanced up, reluctant to have his attention diverted from his drink and his friends, but amiable enough to give a brief answer.

"It's always students. They all think of the same old joke and they all think they're the first ones to think of it. Because of the old honey trap legend."

He seemed to expect them to understand this. The Doctor looked down inquiringly at Alison. She looked back up at him and shrugged, and he returned his attention to the man at the table.

"Refresh my memory."

He pointed at a neglected-looking wooden sign at the roadside. Under a scratched and worn slab of transparent plastic it displayed a piece of paper with a dozen lines of writing in self-consciously old fashioned swirly script.

"It's all there. People have been telling this story for hundreds of years. It's supposed to have been one of King Arthur's knights was tempted into a tower or something by beautiful maidens, then he fell asleep and didn't wake up till seven hundred years. There's this whole story about how he wandered round looking for his old friends, going to his own castle and finding it gone... you must have heard it, right? Everyone has."

The Doctor nodded slowly.

"I've heard something similar. But the man we saw was in fourteenth century dress. Not very Arthurian."

The man shrugged.

"Yeah, well, usually they dress up as knights. I don't know, the story's supposed to have started in the fourteenth century. Maybe the guy got confused."

"Hmm."

The Doctor stopped talking and his eyes focused on the middle distance. Silence fell. Seconds passed. Since the Doctor was giving every appearance of intending to stay like that all day and the man at the table was starting to fidget, Alison drew breath to speak.

"We've taken up too much of your time!"

The Doctor's voice cut across her, bright with decision and energy. Before she knew it he was striding away towards the road, and with an apologetic smile at the man they had been talking to, she was following him.

"Now where are we going?" she demanded, her irritation rising at once again finding herself trailing in his wake to some unknown destination. "Are you buying this whole lost knight thing?"

"Well, I would imagine the Arthurian angle is an elaboration to give the story a little extra colour," he said breezily. "What does interest me is that this knight is supposed to have slept for seven hundred years. And when is this story said to originate?"

"Um, the fourteenth century, right?"

"Right. And how long ago is that?"

Alison calculated quickly.

"It's..." With a calming sense of clarity she saw it. "It's about seven hundred years."

"Exactly. So what do we think? Coincidence?"

Despite everything, she found herself smiling.

"We don't believe in them, right?"

"No, we don't. In which case, do we think that whatever happened to the poor unfortunate who started the legend of the lost knight has happened to our friend back there too?"

She hesitated. Trick question? But it was all she could think of.

"That's what I think."

He gave a nod.

"Good. So do I."

They had crossed the road and cleared the grass bank and the TARDIS was in sight against the trees.

"So what do you say?" the Doctor continued. "Seven hundred years back into the past? Merrie Olde Englande? Robin Hood? And a fair to middling chance of catching whoever's responsible for this in the act? Wait!"

He held up his hand abruptly and Alison tensed. He looked sharply across at her.

"You wanted to visit your mother, didn't you?"

She let out a breath, relaxing and getting irritated at the same time.

"Not now, Doctor. We'll sort this out first, right?"

His mouth curled up at the corner and there was a spark in his eye which relieved their habitual coldness.

"Right. But remind me later."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Seven hundred years?"

The Master stood impassively, hands linked behind his back, but the lift of a single eyebrow held enough contempt and ridicule for a thousand words.

"And what makes you think this decrepit museum piece will hit that mark rather than accidentally taking us to Skaro three million years in the future?"

"I got Alison where she wanted to go didn't I?" said the Doctor, circling the console and making final adjustments to the coordinates.

"Yes, and I'm appalled that she hasn't taken advantage of this once in a lifetime occurrence. I don't think she realises just how much blind luck was involved."

"Leave it, will you?" she protested. "I want to see this through."

"Before you leave us, you mean?"

There was a sterile silence. Alison stood motionless, not knowing what to do or say, but the Doctor continued working the controls as if he hadn't heard.

"If only you had a TARDIS of your own, much better than this one," he said. "What a pity it went up with the Gorro Amari space station and you got murdered by an idiot."

The Master gave a little bob of his head and a quarter of a smile.

"Mm, touche."

The Doctor paused over a dial and looked across at him.

"What do you think, 3.14?"

"I'd say 3.15," the Master replied blandly. The Doctor looked back down at the dial.

"I'll stick with 3.14."

He threw a lever with a melodramatic air of decision and the time rotor pulsed into life. The grey whirl of the time vortex closed around the ship and the centuries fled by like tattered posters on the subway walls.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

The sun hung just above the horizon, splaying a purple-orange light through the clouds, as Tom Mason trudged heavily along the mud track by the woods, his whole body weighed down by the day's labour. Every muscle was stiff and drained of strength, and yet with every step his stride lightened, his drooping head lifting, in happy expectation of what was to come. The sole building was a thatched stone cottage silhouetted on the hilltop, and the only other sign of human life the worn wooden plough abandoned in the field. He was perfectly alone, but happy.

"Hello."

Tom straightened as if from a slap at a voice which seemed to come from nowhere, but when he looked he saw its owner easily enough. Leaning against a nearby oak, dark blue eyes holding a strange blend of cool distance and close interest, his long, finely-woven black coat with its gold thread decorations clearly marked him out as a gentleman and Tom addressed him with due deference.

"Evening, your honour. Fine evening, it is."

A dark-skinned young woman in a colourful short jacket emerged from the trees to stand alongside the man, her gaze resting watchfully upon him. Tom felt the first twinge of unease as to what this strange pair were doing hovering about in the woods.

"Er, do you need help?" he asked.

"That's funny," said the stranger, "I was going to ask you the same question."

Tom's uncertainty deepened and he picked his words carefully, feeling is way through the conversation as though through marshy land.

"No, I'm all right," he said. "I'm going to the tavern."

"Oh, really? We just came from one. Which one are you going to?"

Still uncomfortable under these two odd people's relentlessly inquisitive stares, Tom nonetheless brightened at the subject.

"The new one. The Green Dragon. Have you been there?"

Their reaction was as strange as everything else they had said and done. The two of them eyed him in silence before turning to talk quietly to one another as if he didn't exist.

"Doctor, I'm pretty sure that pub's not seven hundred years old."

Doctor? Tom frowned. The last man he'd heard called that had been a fairground hawker. Perhaps this one wasn't a gentleman after all - it would explain his strange behaviour and novelty servant girl.

"It's possible it's a new pub built on the site of the old," the Doctor replied, not looking convinced.

He pondered distractedly before looking round at Tom again.

"What's your name?"

"Tom, sir. Tom Mason."

"Well, Tom, I hope you don't object to some company at this tavern?"

"Of course not," he replied dutifully, looking far from thrilled.

**. . . . . . . . . .**

"Doctor, there's something I've been meaning to ask you about."

They had let Tom get a little way ahead on the path so that they could talk softly without being overheard. The Doctor looked at the heavy-footed young man trudging along tensely as though he could feel them lurking behind him.

"There's something I've been meaning to tell you about. Is the question about whether we can save that man now that we've found him?"

Alison felt a chill at the base of her spine and suddenly she was no longer certain that she wanted to know. It occurred to her that if it was good news then he would have told her already.

"Yes."

He gave a nod of acknowledgement, not looking at her, his eyes on the dirt track underfoot.

"I'm sorry. It can't be done. He gets killed by a train seven hundred years into the future. That's what happened, we saw it. Trying to change it causes nothing but pain."

Alison sighed bitterly.

"Had a feeling it'd be that way." She gestured helplessly at the man ahead of them. "Just looks so alive right now, you know?"

On impulse she quickened her steps and caught up with Tom, leaving the Doctor behind.

"Hi," she said, giving him a smile.

He looked wary as if fearing to get his pocket picked.

"Hello."

"It's Tom, right? I'm Alison."

He seemed uncertain what to make of this.

"So..." She reached for some small talk. "What do you do? For a living, I mean."

"I'm a stone mason."

"Oh, cool. That's got to be pretty interesting."

He didn't look as if this was an observation which had previously occurred to him.

"Right," she went on. "So... what sort of things do you... um."

Alison winced at the empty prattle coming from her own mouth and fell silent. She looked across at his stolid features, his obvious discomfort at her presence barely scraping at his contentment with where he was and where he was going. The memory was already starting to seem like a bad dream. The knowledge that such a little time ago she had seen that same face contorted with terror, the same eyes gleaming with tears, and then the train... The roar of sound, the vast, unstoppable bulk of metal hurtling towards his fragile flesh and blood body.

There was nothing they could do for him, the Doctor said, nothing but find those responsible and keep others from meeting the same fate. He was like a walking ghost to her, a solid, beefy, warm-smelling ghost with no inkling of his own bleak destiny. The sense of her own helplessness overwhelmed her.

"So," she tried again desperately, "you have a wife? A girlfriend?"

He threw her a sideways glance.

"I don't have any money."

"Huh?" She frowned over this for a moment before realising the implication. "Hey!"

She didn't have time to collect herself to retaliate. At that moment with a dizzying sense of recognition she rounded a curve in the track and was brought face to face with the Green Dragon pub, almost exactly as she remembered it. The sign swinging above the road was crudely hand-painted, the building itself was timber and plaster, and the carpark was a row of stables, and yet everything was the same. At the tables outside were the same merry revellers sprawled on the benches, swigging back flagons of drink brought out to them by young women in loose, low-cut blouses. The serving girls themselves might have been less sleek, and more curvy, but they had the same boisterous wiggle to their hips, the same artful bending motions as they set down trays of refreshments. The noise was the same, the rising din of hearty shared pleasure, the shedding of inhibitions, and the need to share that elation with others.

Alison found that she was standing still on the path, still a hundred feet from the tavern, and felt the Doctor at her side as she watched Tom quicken his pace and plunge in amongst the happy gathering at the tables. He found someone he knew, there was laughter and shoulder-slapping, and a few moments later he was lost to view in the throng. Alison closed her eyes.

"I know," the Doctor said quietly. "Time travel hurts."

She physically shook herself out of the sinking gloom which had been threatening to overcome her and looked up at him sharply.

"Doctor, I'm not buying this. I'm not buying the idea that this pub stood here, hardly changing, for seven hundred years."

He gave a nod.

"Agreed. Tell me something, Alison. You used to live not far away. Do you remember this pub?"

It hadn't crossed her mind. She'd forgotten that this spot was no more than a couple of miles from where she had grown up.

"Hey, that's a point. I'd never seen it before. I guess I was sort of assuming it had just opened. Looked pretty new."

"Yes. So it's both brand new and seven hundred years old. Intriguing, isn't it?"

As they watched, the most beautiful of the serving girls, a woman of no more than twenty, with sapphire-blue eyes, glittering dark blonde hair, and cleavage which strained against her flimsy blouse, turned and looked directly at them. With a slow, spreading smile which promised all manner of unspoken delights, she beckoned them in.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

Alison smiled. The Doctor, she could see, was in no danger of being seduced, tempted, or even persuaded to enter into the spirit of things. He refused all offers of drinks, food, and company with an identical tight-lipped lack of civility as he shouldered his way through the merry throng towards the tavern main entrance. Whispered words, out-thrust bosoms and hands plucking at his sleeve were ignored and he only stopped directly in front of the door when the girl who had beckoned them planted herself directly in their path, the brightness of her smile belying the determination of her stance.

"You don't want to go in there," she beamed, tray of pewter tankards balanced on the fingertips of one hand. "Stay out here in the lovely sun, have a drink. The first is on the house!"

"We're not thirsty," the Doctor said. "And I don't tan well."

"Oh, just the one," the girl implored him, leaning forward till the tray was almost under his nose. "Trust me you'll have tasted nothing like it before."

Seeing him obdurate, she turned to Alison.

"How about you, young Miss? Trust me, you won't regret it."

She proffered one of the heavy tankards and Alison took it automatically, peering down at the dark yellowish fluid swirling within. The Doctor folded his arms lest she try the same ploy with him.

"Free drinks?" he asked. "A glamorous waitress for every dozen or so customers? Is that any way to run a business?"

"Oh, nothing's too good for our customers," she said brightly. "The manager always says, anything the patrons want, they should have. We just want them to be happy, and drink lots of our wonderful brew."

"Is that so? I'd like to meet this manager of yours. Is he inside?"

"Oh..." She looked momentarily lost, her eyes becoming unfocused. "No, no, no... But he's about here somewhere. Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink?"

"Quite sure. Tell me, where do you source this drink of yours from? Who's your supplier? How much does it cost you? How many barrels do you get through in a day?"

Her smile, if anything, became broader.

"Oh, I wouldn't know about that. I'm just here to make the customers happy."

"I see. And where do you come from? What's your home town? What's your salary for making the customers happy? How are your parents?"

She didn't stop smiling, and there was not a crinkle of concern in her face, but the ease and bonhomie was draining from her.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Why do you want to know all this?"

"Thirst for knowledge," the Doctor said briskly. He leaned forward, his eyes sharpening as his inspection of the bright-eyed serving girl intensified.

"Like what you see?" she inquired coquettishly, placing one hand on her hip and pouting as she misread his interest.

"Hmm. Well you certainly look human enough."

Experimentally he poked the flesh of her forearm with one extended fingertip. Her smile looked blanker and more foolish by the moment.

"Um... perhaps I can get you something to eat?"

The Doctor straightened.

"Yes, good idea. Get us some nachos with guacamole and salsa, two glasses of Coke, and four poppadums."

Her smile was like a car's headlights, but she nodded without pause.

"Certainly."

She didn't move, but she also didn't make any objection when the Doctor slipped past her, pushing open the tavern door to press on into the murky interior. Alison followed him and the heavy wooden door slammed shut behind them, cutting off the bright sunlight and merry chatter, and leaving them alone in a quiet, barely-lit, low-ceilinged chamber, empty but for a perfunctory scattering of rough chairs and tables.

"Don't really see what she was trying to hide," remarked Alison. "Unless they're just embarrassed they haven't decorated in here yet."

Absently she found that she was still clutching the tankard which had been thrust into her hand, and she raised it to her nostrils and smiled at the scent. It wasn't beer, it smelt of honey and spices. Just the aroma was invigorating and calming at the same time. She suddenly realised how thirsty she was feeling...

"Don't touch that." The Doctor snatched it from her grasp. "In the best of circumstances, a drink from a mediaeval tavern? You don't know where it's been."

He sniffed at it in his turn, eyes narrow with suspicion, and Alison waited for the verdict.

"What is it, Doctor? Is it mead? I've never had that."

"Mm." He twitched his nostrils over the edge of the cup and inhaled deeply. "It is similar to mead, at any rate I think that's the flavour they were aiming for. But all these other flavours... they're not like anything that would have been available in Britain at this time."

He tipped the cup back to his lips and drew some of the liquid in through pursed lips, inhaling to make it bubble on his tongue the way she had seen wine buffs do on TV. He grimaced and spat the liquid out onto the grey flagstone floor.

"Nasty?" Alison inquired.

"No," said the Doctor. "Delicious, refreshing, soothing, stimulating... everything you could ask for from a drink, as a matter of fact. So enticing that most people won't notice the aftertaste of oliviac resin and those who do won't care."

Alison frowned.

"Oliviac... what?"

"It's not found on Earth," the Doctor said, face empty of motion and expression. "It's a poison."

Alison's mouth fell open and she stared first at the splattered liquid the Doctor had spat onto the floor, then back at the door which led out onto the happy revellers they had left behind.

"Poison? They're killing the people? All of them?"

"Well..." He eyed the liquid in the tankard again as though he could penetrate its secrets by sight alone. "It's a small dose, you'd need to drink more than one cup, and even then it wouldn't be fatal right away. In fact it's possible it gives the drink an enjoyable extra kick. Still, if you managed to drink enough of it without passing out you'd be in a coma first, then dead an hour or two later."

Alison set the cup down carefully on the nearest table.

"This is the tower with the tempting maidens the old story talks about isn't it? And it's the pub in the twenty-first century as well."

"Certainly looks that way. Appearing once every seven hundred years to draw people in with offers of free nectar and provocative company. Why, I've no idea."

She managed a smile.

"But we're going to find out, right?"

He surprised her with one of his rare, wide smiles in return, the briefest flash of white teeth, and a crinkling of the skin about his eyes, a short-lived glimpse behind the coldness of his face.

"Of course we are."


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

"Check around the room. Look for anything that doesn't belong in a fourteenth century tavern."

All business, the Doctor was brisk and energetic as he retrieved his sonic screwdriver with a flourish, twirling it around his fingers while he moved to follow his own instructions. He stalked across the room to run his palms across what appeared to be a solid stone wall and, it seemed, actually was one.

Alison headed left, and peered through the keyhole of a rickety wooden door to see nothing but a dingy-looking storeroom beyond. She kept talking as she did so.

"So the girls outside... the waitresses... are we saying they're aliens in disguise? Robots? What?"

The Doctor tapped at a crack in the wall for a moment as though expecting it to be a hidden switch, then moved on with a disappointed shrug while he answered her.

"I think I could spot a robot, but if they were space travellers clever enough to disguise themselves then they wouldn't have been so easily confused. My guess is they're illusions."

"Illusions?" She turned to face him. "You're saying they're not solid?"

"Well, not permanently solid, at any rate. It's not all that difficult, it's just a matter of synchronising a three-dimensional remote image with a projected forcefield. Gives you something solid enough to smile and serve drinks, which seems to be all that's required of them."

He took a step back and eyed the wall critically.

"It's possible the whole building is created in the same way, in which case finding what's generating it won't be as simple as poking around till we come across a maintenance hatch."

"But the machine that's doing this, it has to be close by, right?"

"Absolutely. The greater the distance, the greater the energy required and the greater the complexity of projecting the illusion so that it can interact with its surroundings."

Alison pondered this, and her eyes dropped to the floor.

"So... underneath the building would be a good place?"

The Doctor followed her look and pursed his lips on seeing what she had seen: plain as day, barely concealed under one of the tables, a plain wooden trapdoor, two feet square, right in the centre of the stone floor.

"A splendid place."

He was at the hatch in two strides and struck it open with the toe of his shoe. They clustered over the murky opening, dizzyingly seeming to drop away into infinity until their eyes adjusted and they could make out a twisted, almost organic assembly of grey-black pipes and tubes woven into a cylindrical chamber beneath their feet. Alison glanced over at the Doctor and saw his eyes agleam, like a child in a toystore.

"Okay," she sighed. "You want to give me a hand down?"

It was a moment before he could tear himself away from his fascinated inspection of the tightly-knit root system of strange machinery, but he took her hands and supported her weight while she stepped warily down through the hole, her booted feet swinging aimlessly in search of a toehold until she found purchase on a great curving tube which slalomed around the curve of the wall. The Doctor was lying full length on the floor of the room above, his arms stretched down to her, before she finally tripped and blundered down onto a mirror-smooth metallic floor.

"All right, Alison?" came his sharp voice.

She looked around her new surroundings and down at her own body before feeling ready to commit herself to an answer.

"Yeah. I'm ok."

The room wasn't as dark as it had seemed at first. She could see the pipes intertwining, a faint gleam appearing here and there from their midst where they parted and left spaces she could have pushed her hand through. A low hum pervaded the air, little more than a vibration she could feel running up from her feet and leaving a faintly queasy sensation in her stomach. As the Doctor dropped down to join her with a clang on the metal floor, she started to be able to make out the passageway which curved away into shadow ahead of her.

The Doctor's head craned and swivelled, his shining eyes devouring everything he saw.

"Fascinating," he breathed. "Look at it, Alison. It's perfect. No bolts, no rivets, no clamps. It's completely self-supporting, it's like a living thing."

"Not sure I feel good about that idea."

Her remark seemed to bring him back to Earth, and he gave her a faint smile before getting back to business.

"Come on. Let's see what's down here."

"Wish I could think it was going to be something nice," she muttered, and followed him into the gloom.

. . . . . . . . . .

Upstairs, out amongst the sun-drenched tables in front of the tavern, something was going slowly but surely wrong. The serving girls still tossed their heads and smiled, still wiggled as they walked with their trays perfectly balanced on their fingertips, but when their contented customers raised their hands or shouted for more drinks and more attention, they were left sitting disappointed and ignored. The girls slid past them as though they did not exist, circling the area as though that were an end in itself, and little by little the laughter and chatter soured and voices were raised in discontent. It wasn't long before the first crack appeared. A thin, pale-skinned man scowled his anger at going unacknowledged and jumped to his feet, lunging forward to seize the girl by the elbow, tugging her off balance so that her burden of tankards crashed to the ground in a foaming mess.

He bared bad teeth into her face as she turned to face him, ready with some bitter insult, but it died in his throat when he looked into her eyes. They were not afraid, not angry, but the friendly warmth they had once held had been replaced by something terrible. A cold, remote disinterest which told him he was a crawling thing unworthy of her notice. And an unbending, unreasoning purpose.

Only the few who were nearby heard the sound of his neck cracking in her grip, but the ripple of movement, of cries of fear and disbelief, ran through the crowd like an electric shock. Heads span this way and that, everyone aware that something horrifying had happened, few aware of what it was. The girls halted, and their wide eyes gazed upon the crowd, who to the last man quailed with a superstitious dread. Tables and benches were kicked over in sudden panic, burly men fleeing as though the furies of hell were upon them. It was a matter of seconds before the tavern's forecourt was abandoned and left in disarray, the dead man the only one left. The girls didn't stir. They stood as though listening, and then as one lifted their chins attentively. The one who had beckoned to the Doctor and Alison spoke:

"The unit is penetrated by outside organisms. Operational equilibrium is interrupted. Sterilisation is required."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Look at this!"

Unable to suppress her indulgent smile as she followed the Doctor's fast-moving form, Alison realised she was starting to feel like a mother taking an energetic five year old around a fairground. She had seldom seen him so exercised. Caution forgotten, he darted from one insane tangle of machinery to another, genuinely thrilled by what she realised was the rare experience for him of seeing something he had not encountered before.

"Temporal manipulation matrix!" he exclaimed, as though expecting a prize for recognising it. "Primitive by Gallifreyan standards of course, but good enough to take a grip on a little bit of space and control the passage of time within it. And it's so beautiful. Look how the pneumismatic field convertor is spliced into the same conduit as the chronal damping panel. This is just... genius!"

"It's a time machine?" asked Alison, earning herself a resentful look.

"Well..." He visibly took a grip on himself in his effort to think down to her level. "It's not like the TARDIS, you couldn't travel in time with it. But it can manipulate time within limited parameters."

"Okay," she said patiently. "So what's it for?"

He drew breath to speak, then held it.

"Good question, actually."

He frowned at the twisted mass of tubes and filaments, his mind apparently shifted onto a different track. From academic interest to inquisitorial curiosity. After a long, concentrated spell of intense thought he stretched out one long finger to flick a switch.

It was like pulling the cord on a venetian blind. In a single motion a hundred six foot high ovoid covers slipped aside, studding the passageway wall as far as the eye could see. Alison and the Doctor both tensed, but nothing immediately lurched forth, and they drew cautiously nearer to the closest of the sunken recesses which had been unveiled.

The man inside was short, a few inches over five feet, with thick hair and beard standing out in square chunks as if he had cut it himself with a knife. Garbed in the simplest of woollen tunics, he stood with his eyes shut and not so much as a twitch of movement.

The Doctor breathed out softly, covering his mouth for a moment with his hand.

"Seventh century, I'd say. Give or take."

Alison took a second, incredulous look at the short, scruffy man in the pod.

"This is the Arthurian knight?"

He smiled a little.

"The truth behind the legend is often a letdown."

They moved on, to the next recess, which housed another motionless sleeper. More simply dressed even than the last, he was also short, but powerfully built and bare-chested.

"Pre-Roman," the Doctor said, his wonder and delight at the find ebbing away. His upper lip shrivelled in the first signs of his slow-burning anger as he walked to the next one. "Pre-Celtic," he said plainly, staring ahead at the rest of the line.

The passageway curved down and to the left, out of sight, and there was no end to the sleepers peacefully closeted in their coffin-sized chambers. The Doctor halted, thrusting his hands down into his pockets, staring down the line through narrowed eyes.

"One for every seven hundred years?" Alison asked softly. "Our guy, then the knight or whatever he was, and back and back for...?"

"For millennia," the Doctor confirmed grimly. "Who knows how far this passage goes? Someone's been making a collection."

He was drawing breath to say something else, but instead he whirled and faced back the way they had come, his head lifted like a hunting hawk. Alison heard nothing, but an instant later he grasped her elbow and hustled her onward, deeper and deeper into the unknown.

. . . . . . . . . .

Moments later their pursuers came past the same spot like a rustling wave. Physically they were the girls who had been serving drinks at the tavern, but they moved like panthers and their faces were set hard, their eyes wide and staring, their hands held out like claws.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

The ages of humanity flashed past Alison as she and the Doctor hastened down the passageway, every pod they ran past taking her a little further back in time. Before she knew it the comatose occupants were in skins and furs. Not long after that they were not even human; they were low-browed, heavy-featured approximations of human she realised with a superstitious shudder were neanderthals. And all the time the gloomy, claustrophobic passageway curled around and down ahead of them, taking them down in a vast corkscrew shape, more and more pods lined up as far as her straining eyes could see.

The Doctor was no longer paying attention to the sleepers. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and his mouth tightened at the corner.

This is no good. They re getting nearer.

Who s... ack!

Caught by surprise by his hand clutching her jacket at the shoulder, Alison stumbled to a halt and found herself pushed against the wall, the Doctor s palm held up inches from her face.

Stay there.

He delved into the sinuous tangle of circuitry which surrounded the hunched, broad-shouldered, naked creature in the nearest pod, twisting parts of it free and deftly snapping tubes, a pale fluid leaking unregarded onto the floor. His face locked rigid in concentration, his fingers stabbing into the machine with the precision of surgical implements, he seemed completely oblivious to the feral swarm of young women rising into view from along the passage.

Outside organisms, came the low, diamond-hard voice of the leader. Sterilisation is required.

Doctor? hissed Alison.

Hush, was his response, without so much as a flicker in his expression.

She could only stand and stare like a rabbit caught in a truck s headlights as the women swept towards them, their swaying, lazy motions accelerated into a ruthless, catlike economy of movement. She stared desperately at the Doctor, clutching at her faith that he was about to pull some miraculous rabbit out of a hat as he had done so many times before.

The Doctor grimaced with the effort of driving his hand hard into the opening he had made in the wall, then winced at an electric blue flash from whatever he was gripping. Teeth clenched, he didn t recoil, but tightened his hold and pulled. In a tangled spewing of pipes and tubes, an egg-shaped block of densely structured grey metal came free, a strange red light streaming from it, swimming and twisting like a living thing. The Doctor whirled to face the women who were now just feet away, and played the light directly into their faces.

Alison tensed, expecting those curled, outstretched talon-like fingers grabbing and tearing at her limbs. It didn t happen. Inch by inch, she uncurled from her defensive crouch and saw what had happened. The women stood like a paused film, frozen in place, so still they seemed two-dimensional. The Doctor stood calmly, keeping the red light on them, the device in his hand still joined to the wall by a silvery-white filament.

Stasis field, he explained with a sideways glance at her. It s what they re using to keep these people preserved in their pods, and about the only thing that would be effective against projected illusions, if that s what they are.

He rested the ovoid gadget carefully in the torn hole in the wall, its light still aimed at the trapped women, and took a step forward towards them, their wide blank eyes staring, their grasping hands just inches from his face. He linked his hands behind his back and inspected them closely.

Alison hung back uncomfortably.

Doctor, let s go. Who knows how long that thing will hold them?

It s a time machine, he replied distractedly. It will hold them for eternity.

Unconvinced, she fidgeted and glanced over her shoulder, half expecting a second wave of attackers to appear. The Doctor was as close to the foremost woman as he could get without being caught in the beam himself, his eyes focused tightly on the skin of her face.

If she s artificial, he said, there ll be imperfections, it s inevitable. If there are imperfections, they may give us a clue about where these things come from and who made them.

Just wish we could do that without standing here asking to get caught, she grumbled.

She knew better than to try and talk him round and fell silent, itching to be under way. At least the device he had plucked from the wall seemed to be working steadily. The thought drifted across her mind that ripping it from its moorings must have damaged something else. She considered the question of what it had previously been used for, and her eyes slid to the half-human cave creature in the recess beside her.

He was no taller than she, but his shoulders were broad as a weightlifter s. As she watched, his eyes flickered and the muscles of his arm twitched. Alison s breath caught in her throat.

Doctor she managed to hiss.

He made a dismissive fanning gesture to quieten her down.

Yes, yes, in a minute.

She grabbed his sleeve, hauling him back, but it was too late. The apelike thing in the pod was awake, and as it took in its surroundings its features contorted in a mottled twist of fury and fear. Even as the Doctor half turned, at last realising something was up, a hairy arm lashed out like a club, striking him between the shoulder blades and sending him stumbling across the corridor. At the same time, the caveman s other arm slammed hard into the wall where the time device was wedged, making it wobble precariously on its perch. Frantic, Alison leaped forward and rapped her arms round the creature s barrel chest, trying to pull it back, but it threw her off as though she were weightless and she landed heavily on her back, the breath driven from her lungs.

Helpless, she watched another wild swing strike the device, sending it clattering to the floor, its light flashing around wildly before beaming uselessly into the wall. Wheezing like a beached fish, she struggled to reach it but it was too late. The women were freed from its influence as though nothing had happened, and they swarmed forward with arms outstretched. Alison could think of nothing to do but close her eyes and clench her teeth against the end.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Alison awoke with a buzzing in her head, a white blur before her eyes, and something hard pressing against her back. It was a few disorientating moments before she grasped that she was lying flat on the floor staring at the ceiling.

"Welcome back."

Sitting on the floor a few feet away with his knees drawn up to his chest, the Doctor gave her a thin smile. Alison dazedly managed to raise her head and looked around. They were penned in a cube-shaped white room, no more than four feet high, the walls, floor and ceiling all patterned identically in a barely perceptible arrangement of squares, as though the structure had been put together from a kit. Squirming over onto her side she took a closer look at the Doctor and realised it wasn't her vision that was blurring his outline. He was separated from her by a clear plastic panel which divided the room neatly in half.

"How do you feel?" he asked, somehow sounding more polite than interested.

She pushed herself up on her palms into a sitting position and took stock. Apart from a spinning in her head, she found that she was undamaged.

"I'm okay, I think. What's up, Doctor? I thought they were going to kill us."

His eyes were hollow and without passion when he looked at her.

"They are."

She couldn't suppress the chill which ran through her veins and up her spine.

"When?"

He shook his head and took a deep breath before replying, as though this was something he'd been trying to forget.

"This isn't a cell to hold us until they lead us off to some other fate, this is it. We re sealed in, Alison. We've been left here to die."

Her fists tightened.

"Of thirst?"

How many days did that take? Or was it a week? The thought of this slow, grim death loomed up in front of her. The Doctor gave a tired nod of his head.

"Or we take the easy way out."

His glance indicated the sole feature in the room, a low shelf on which stood two clear plastic cups of some yellowish fluid. One on his side of the barrier, one on hers. Alison hunched up her knees.

"Poison?"

"The same stuff they're feeding to those people in the tavern, but a concentrated dose." He eyed the two containers, scientific curiosity sparking a little life in him. "I don't recognise the precise blend, but I'd say instant coma, followed by death in an hour or so."

"But why?" asked Alison helplessly. "If they want us dead, why not just kill us? Why play with us like this?"

"This place is run by a mechanical intelligence. I think this is just the way it's programmed to kill. It's applying the methods it uses to trap those unfortunates in the tavern to the problem of what to do with intruders. Logical, in a mad sort of way. That s computers for you."

"But it's not killing the people in the tavern, is it? It's keeping them alive in the booths."

"It's keeping one alive for every seven hundred years. Probably giving them an antidote once they re incapacitated. I wouldn't like to say what it does with the others."

Alison looked down while she assimilated this, and suddenly realised what a dismal, defeated figure she must appear. Swiftly she straightened, tossing her head back.

"So come on. We've got to figure a way out of here."

He looked back at her expressionlessly. A worm of doubt twisted inside her but she pressed on.

"Don't give me that look, it's just a plastic box, and you're telling me you can't think of a way to escape?"

She fought down her rising sense of panic at the sheer lack of response in the Doctor s face.

"They were very thorough," he said. "They've taken the sonic screwdriver and every other piece of technology I had with me. This room is sealed tight and, unless you have some dynamite on you, indestructible. If anyone was listening I'd be trying to talk my way out, but they're not."

His face became taut as he looked down at his shoes, and he burst out quickly:

"Alison, I'm sorry. We should have run on when you said. I was so sure..." He smacked the ball of his fist three times against his brow. "Stupid, stupid, stupid. I thought the caveman would be unconscious. I thought the stasis beam was just to preserve him, not to keep him prisoner as well. I was sure the system wouldn't be run off a single emitter. Who builds a system to last for thousands of years with no back-up? It s..." He quelled his rising, angry voice and said again: "I m sorry."

"It's okay, Doctor."

"It's not! Look what I ve led you to. Look at us!"

"You didn't lead me here. I came because I wanted to, you know that."

Her attempted words of comfort rolled off him. His pale, narrow face stared blankly at the cold walls of their prison. Alison almost backed down and retreated into a corner. It was compassion more than fear that made her speak.

"I trust you, Doctor. You'll get us out of this, I know it."

He managed a faint smile.

"Blind faith, Alison? Things must be worse than I thought."

"It's not blind," she said. "I know you. I've seen you save whole planets with a piece of string and a clockwork toy. Come on, Doctor, think. There's a way out, there has to be."

He sighed and rested his head back against the wall, but some of the bitterness drained from his face. A long minute crawled by before he spoke.

"There might be one way."

Hope flared inside her. It was all she could do to keep from leaping up and pressing her palms to the clear partition. He took a look at her wide, expectant eyes and smiled.

"Don't give me that look, Alison, this idea isn't one for the scrapbook of my genius."

She watched him crawl over to where the cup of yellow liquid stood on its shelf.

"I was thinking, they must be planning on disposing of the body once either of us drinks this stuff. If I drink it now, they'll have to open up my half to take me out."

Alison's lips parted, the full weight of what he had just said sinking like cold iron in her belly.

"But... you'll die."

"Well..." He held the cup to his nostrils and sniffed. "As I said, it would induce coma before it caused death. It's possible I'll regenerate."

"Possible?" she repeated faintly. He gave her a look all sad seriousness.

"Well, regeneration isn t an exact science. Under the best of circumstances it carries its risks, and poisoning is not the best of circumstances. But with luck they'll remove me from the cell while I'm comatose and when I revive I'll be somewhere I can escape and come back for you."

"Or they'll burn the body!" she protested. "Or bury it! Doctor, this is..."

"Alison!"

His voice snapped across and silenced her, and she sank back miserably against the wall. He took one look at her and his eyes softened. He gestured helplessly as though imploring her approval.

"I did say it wasn't that great a plan. It's the best I can do."

"No." She shook her head. "You're not doing this. Even if it works, you'll be... you'll be..."

"Gone," he affirmed. "Or changed, depending on how you see it."

"There's got to be another way."

He gave her a sad smile.

"Not this time, Alison. Sometimes there's just no cheap and easy way out."

"But..."

"Alison." He interrupted her again, but gently, his face turned away to the wall. "I have to do this. I got you into this. My arrogance, my over-confidence. I won't let you die because of me."

She clenched her jaw to keep her lips from quivering, and he spoke so softly she almost didn't hear:

"It was my fault that Jasmine died."

"That's not true!" she managed, dredging up enough spirit to answer back. "It was the creep who murdered her."

"He murdered her because of me. It wasn't enough for me just to defeat him. I decided it would be funny to humiliate him too, and I made him hate me enough that he killed her for no reason but to make me suffer." He looked up, a clarity of decision coming to his eyes. "I won't lose you the same way, Alison. I have to do this."

He tightened his grip on the cup, drawing in a calming breath, and she flung herself at the partition.

"No!" she cried frantically. "Not now! Wait for a day, we can spare that long. Something may come up, you may think of something else. You don t have to do this!"

He kept his eyes fixed on the liquid in the cup, a slight tremor visible in the hand which held it.

"Please, Alison, I've just about plucked up the courage. I would like to go out bravely."

Her eyes shone, and the first tears leaked onto her cheeks. She could muster only a desperate appeal, her palms splayed against the glass:

"Don't leave me."

He glanced over and managed a little smile of reassurance.

"Never. And just think, who knows what will come out of the regeneration? Perhaps you'll get someone nice."

She coughed out a sob, all her efforts to be brave dissolving.

"I don't want someone nice," she managed through her tears. "I want you."

He stared round at her, and a moment later threw his head back in a peal of genuine laughter. Unable to resist, she found herself laughing and crying at the same time. The Doctor almost spilled the cup of poison, and laughed harder still. For a few seconds more they giggled together till they brought themselves under control.

The Doctor took a deep breath, looked down at the cup, then seemed to remember something important.

"I really was going to take you to see the pyramids being built, you know. I hadn't forgotten."

Alison managed to hold herself back from weeping again. She spoke with just a wobble in her voice:

"I know you were."

He raised the cup as if offering a toast.

"Nothing is certain in this upside-down life of mine. We may yet meet again."

And with that he drained the liquid at a single gulp. Alison slammed her fists against the glass and cried out her despair. The Doctor let the cup fall and pressed one palm to his chest, the other to the floor to support a body which seemed suddenly heavy.

"Ooh. That... burns."

He looked as if he had something else to say, but he wasn't given time. He toppled limply forward to crash face first to the floor, and lay twisted awkwardly on one side, all signs of life snuffed out like a candle flame. Alison wrapped her arms tight around her head and wept as she had never wept before.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

Alison had watched huddled in the corner, her eyes red from weeping every tear she had in her, when a panel in the Doctor's half of the cell slid away and a swarm of steel tentacles reached through, knotting themselves around his limbs and dragging him away. Minute by minute, time slipped by unheeded, and all she could see was the image of his cold, lifeless face blazed into her memory.

Eventually physical discomfort took its grip on her attention and the world around started to seem halfway real again. She was hungry, her limbs ached from too long sitting motionless on a hard floor, and she could feel the dried tears streaking her skin. Fiercely she rubbed her face and shifted to a fresh position. How long, she wondered. How long did regeneration take? How long would it take him to find a way to release her? How long before she knew if the Doctor's desperate plan had worked?

Worked? The word was like a bitter taste in her mouth. How could it have worked when it had taken him from her?

She realised they had taken her watch from her along with all the Doctor's technological equipment, and she had no means of counting the hours which must by now have passed. She crouched alone in this white plastic box and felt the guilt of her selfishness when she found herself worrying that she would be left here to die, or to follow the Doctor by taking the fatal drink. Alison lowered her head, clutching her hair tightly in her fists, near suffocated by the emptiness inside her.

Then there was a click. The panel behind her slipped back and away, and she tumbled back out of the cell, lying for a moment caught like an up-ended beetle. Her face cleared with a dawning hope, and she murmured:

"Doctor!"

She scrambled quickly to her feet and looked around. There was no sign of him or anyone else. She was in a narrow space hemmed in on both sides by the same thick mass of tubes and pipes they had seen in the passageway on the way down.

"Doctor?"

No reply. She wondered if he had opened the cell remotely from some distant part of the complex. So should she stay and wait for him or get moving and try to escape? She hesitated, but a glance back at the antiseptic white cube from which she had just emerged was enough to make the decision for her. Anything but staying here in this deathly place.

She made a slow, nervous progress, but in truth there was nothing standing in her way. Squeezing through the narrow spaces between the tight-packed tubes, she soon emerged in a slowly curving passageway. The same one in which they had been captured, the recesses and their sleeping occupants now closed off once more by their gleaming shutters.

Alison hurried back the way she had come, knowing that she just had to keep heading up to find the exit. Every second she expected a horde of prowling computer-generated women to pounce, but everything was quiet as the grave. She emerged from the hatch back in the tavern's inner room and stumbled out into sunlight.

She stood and stared for a moment, dazed by the unreality of the scene. Just as before, customers relaxed, chatted, sang and drank their diluted poison at the tables. The serving maids shimmied between them with trays of yet more tankards, smiling, flirting, posing. Alison wanted to scream at them. Didn't they know what had happened? Didn't they realise the Doctor was dead? Who he was? What he'd done? The sunlight streamed down and hurt her eyes, and no one paid her any attention. Clumsily Alison made herself put one foot in front of the other and hurried away, back across the field. Back to the TARDIS.

She had never felt so alone as when she walked with dragging feet to the battered old blue box, digging down into her pocket for the key, without him The cool white light of the interior welcomed her home with its reassuring hum of power, but this time it just seemed empty. Weighed down by a sense of inconceivable weariness, Alison saw the Master standing at the console, facing the doors as though he had been expecting her.

"Ah." He glanced over her shoulder. "Are we missing someone?"

Alison felt her hackles rising. She glared at his large, still figure, raging at the thought of what she was going to tell him, and that he probably wouldn't even care.

"Just shut up for once," she muttered sourly. "The Doctor's not been back?"

"Well, no. You've mislaid him?"

His supercilious half smile grated against her unhappiness and she spat her words out with venom:

"The Doctor's dead, okay? He died right in front of me, I watched him die. The Doctor's dead!"

"Dead?" The faintest wrinkle of disappointment touched the Master's brow. "Permanently dead?"

She gestured impatiently.

"Dead... regenerated."

"Ahh." He considered this, and a broad smile spread slowly across his bearded face, splitting inevitably into a laugh, white teeth flashing. "That's marvellous!"

Alison stared at him, aghast. She hadn't expected compassion, but this...

"What's wrong with you, are you sick? The Doctor's your friend, he saved your life. Don't you care even a little bit? Don't you care that you'll never see him again?"

"Oh..." The Master smiled, his eyes widening with amusement. "I'll see him again."

She shrugged bitterly.

"He'll be... it won't be him."

"Quite, quite." He mocked her with a show of sympathy, nodding his head, eyes slanted down mournfully. "Would it help to cheer you up if I killed him the instant he arrives?"

She grimaced, turning her head away, feeling on the verge of nausea.

"What's that supposed to be, a joke?"

"Not at all, it's one of the options I'm seriously considering."

Suddenly she looked directly at him, because it came home to her that something was wrong. The Master was smiling, but no, he wasn't joking. His eyes shone with amusement, but also with a supremely confident and implacable purpose. She glanced past him at the console, at the special switch the Doctor had shown her.

"That's not funny," she said.

She moved forward, trying to look unconcerned, as if she was just going to close the doors, but she couldn't take her eyes from the switch.

"Oh, the Doctor won't mind," the Master said, the hard, intent smile not stirring from his lips. "He knows it's all a game."

She shivered, hunching up her shoulders to hide it, and sidled past him. The Master watched her closely, but didn't make a move to prevent her. He stood motionless until she was standing by the console, just two yards from him, her curled hand resting on the switch.

"What now, young lady? Surely you're not afraid of a harmless old robot like me?"

Young lady? It crossed her mind that the Master hadn't yet addressed her as Miss Cheney, which he seldom neglected to do since he knew it annoyed her. She hesitated and licked her lips, her fingertips on the control.

"Something... something's not right. We'll turn you back on when the Doctor gets here."

With a sense of relief at her decision she threw the switch and waited for the Master to droop forward, his faceplate swinging open to reveal the mechanical innards of his artificial mind.

She waited a second, and then another. The smile broadened on the Master's face and a roar of panic burned up inside her. She knew then, without a glimmer of doubt, that she faced a terrible, lethal danger. The ever-present sanctuary of the TARDIS was invaded, its safe haven defiled. She faced an enemy more frightening than anything that awaited her outside.

Run! Animal instinct grabbed control of her body and her legs crouched in readiness.

"Now, now." The Master's hand snapped shut about her wrist. "I don't think we'll have you leaving us just yet."

She cried out, his grip bruising her flesh, and lashed at him with her nails. He leaned back smoothly out of harm's way and with a lazy, casual motion the back of his hand struck her full across the face.

Impossible, her mind raged as she reeled back hurt and dazed. Impossible. He couldn't hurt people, he was programmed not to hurt people. The Doctor had said so. Her back crashed into a closet door which swung open under the impact, letting her fall into the arms of the body which lay there. She looked confusedly around and a fresh shock assailed her shaken mind.

Sitting inside the closet, crumpled like a discarded doll, was a black-garbed figure, the face a steel plate which had swung open to display nothing but wires and circuits within. The Master. He was here, and deactivated. She stared at the tall man who strode across the console room floor towards her, a cruel smile on his saturnine features.

"Who... are you?" she managed.

"I?" He halted, looming over her, and seemed to savour the words like fine wine before he spoke them. "I, my dear, am the Master. The real Master. And I am making up for lost time."


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

Smiling fixedly, the Master took a step towards her, and Alison kicked out with both legs at the closet door, slamming it in his face. She cast about the wardrobe for something she might use as a barricade and lit upon an old wooden surfboard. Blotting out the bizarre image of the Doctor owning a surfboard, she shoved it toppling into the door with a wild swing of her arm, bracing it against the inner wall and wedging the door firmly shut.

There was a pause while she lay frozen, waiting, her limbs still entwined with those of the prone android Master. Then there came the light tap of a knuckle against the door.

"Young woman, are you proposing to stay in there for the rest of your life?"

"Are you going to stand out there waiting for me the rest of yours?" she shot back.

She heard him give a light sigh, so much like the one she had heard the android version give so many times to let her know he thought she was being irrational.

"How tiresome. I have plans for that fascinating installation you discovered outside, but I dislike unpredictable variables, and a confused young human with a grudge would most certainly qualify. I really can't allow you to stay in there while I work."

"Tough. I'm not moving."

There was a silence, broken only by the slow, regular drumbeat of the Master's fingers tapping thoughtfully on the closet door.

"If you come out now, I promise I shan't kill you."

"Yeah, well we all know what your promises are worth."

"I'm not a monster, my dear. I don't commit pointless acts of cruelty. Come out now, and I shall escort you to your nice, comfortable bedroom and lock you in. Wouldn't that be more agreeable than staying in there with the risk of exhausting my good humour?"

Alison felt her resolve weaken, starkly aware of how alone and trapped she was behind this thin and flimsily barricaded door. But the image of meekly allowing the Master to shepherd her away to be imprisoned aboard the Doctor's own trusty ship flashed across her mind and her lower lip pushed out stubbornly.

"Forget it. I'm staying right here."

There was a pause, and then his voice returned with a steely edge:

"As you wish. In that case you'll have the pleasure of listening to me greet the Doctor when he makes his way back here. He'll be confused in his post-regenerative state, and will be expecting to meet his neutered mechanical toy. I don't expect him to give me trouble."

She sat and listened to his footsteps moving away, sick fear welling up inside her. Wild thoughts of bursting out at the crucial moment and attacking the Master from behind surfaced and were discarded. Slowly, tentatively, she sat up and turned to the deactivated robot with which she shared the closet.

She knew how to do this, the Doctor had shown her. She also knew she might be about to make things twice as bad as they already were. But then again, it was hard to imagine how things could get much worse. She was thinking too much, she realised. One thing she'd learned from the Doctor, when you were hurtling towards certain defeat, and you came up with one last desperate plan, it was no time to be weighing up the odds. So do it, then. Just do it, then cope with the consequences. She thumbed the reset switch by the Master's ear and pressed herself back against the far wall of the cupboard.

"... so if you'd care to return to the... oh!"

The Master's voice started up as if in mid-sentence, then stopped abruptly. His hand rose unhurriedly to click his face plate shut and his composed human features settled upon her.

"Miss Cheney. Ah... might I ask if you've noticed anything unusual since your return to the TARDIS?"

Alison scowled at the instant cagey dissembling.

"You mean the actual flesh and blood Master who's going to kill us all?"

"Er, yes. Well, at least now I shan't have to waste time trying to distract your attention from him." His eyes left hers and travelled carefully over the interior of the closet, the firmly closed door and the surfboard propping it shut. "Hm," he said at length. "I can see our situation is not a happy one."

She allowed his use of the word "our" to kindle a small flame of hope.

"Are you going to help, or what?" she asked, holding onto the aggression in her voice. The Master looked at her with serious, unblinking eyes.

"If you trust in nothing else, Miss Cheney, trust in my instinct for self-preservation. He will not suffer an android double of himself to exist."

Alison stared back at him, trying to read the deceit brewing behind those calm eyes, but as ever they were like bottomless inky pools, empty of life. Reluctantly she gave a nod.

"Where'd he come from anyway? He's supposed to be dead."

"Well... I fear I may jeopardise the trust and affection in which you hold me if I tell you this."

"Go on."

"You remember our jaunt of a month ago? The Cybermen? Well, I took the precaution of keeping one."

Alison gaped at him incredulously.

"_Keeping_ one?"

"Safely kept dormant, and swiftly dissected. I then used its artificial organs to repair my old body, which the Doctor had helpfully stored in suspended animation. I had imagined I would transfer my own thoughts and memories into him before reviving him. However..."

The Master gestured with an air of resignation at the closet door.

"However what?" she prompted impatiently.

"Well, you recall the temporal surge which almost blew out the console when we landed on our trip to your home town? Lamentably, it also damaged the equipment I was using to suppress the body's brainwaves, and he awoke alone, without me there to explain the situation to him or to dissuade him from rash action." He looked at her with an unaccustomed air of seriousness. "From his point of view, mere hours have passed since Jasmine's death on the Gorro Amari space station. He hasn't lived aboard the TARDIS as I have. He doesn't know you, and he remembers the Doctor as his enemy. I'm afraid he may lack my sympathetic attitude."

"Jesus."

Alison rubbed her brow, trying to absorb the scale of this new disaster when the pain of the Doctor's loss was still so fresh and keen. With a physical effort she threw off the sense of sinking down under the weight of it all and looked up sharply.

"So come on genius," she said. "You reckon you're smarter than the Doctor, don't you? What's your big plan?"

He gave her his soft smile. If she had not known better she would have imagined there was a trace of affection there.

"We do still have a card or two to play. I suggest that we open this door, and while I distract my evil twin, you run and fetch my assistant."

"Your... huh?"

"I do apologise, I haven't told you that part yet, have I? I'm not sure if you met Firman. He was one of that young officer's bodyguards whom we met on Lymnis. He was the one who acquired the Cyberman for me, and we left, he came with us."

"You kept one of the soldiers too?"

"He chose to come."

Alison gave him a doubtful look.

"Seriously? He stayed with you of his own free will?"

"Free will?" The Master's eyes gleamed with silent laughter. "Well, I wouldn't go quite that far."

She closed her eyes in disgust. Just when she thought she'd got past all his plotting, all the secrets she now knew he'd been keeping from her and the Doctor all that time, and resigned herself to his being her one ally, all of a sudden there was more to forgive. The Master inclined his head quizzically on one side.

"I know, I know. Dispiriting, isn't it, to reflect that I'm the nice one?"

Alison took a deep breath and blew it slowly out.

"We'll talk about it later. All right, where is this guy?"

"I'd best draw you a map."

"And what about this distraction? What are you going to do?"

"Ah." The Master rubbed his large, pale hands together, looking unusually animated, a poised readiness coming to his mechanical body. "You leave that to me."


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

The Master was idly flicking at the controls of the monitor screen, hopefully scanning the area around the TARDIS in search of a figure that might be the Doctor, when the closet door burst open. He whirled, poised and ready, and smiled grimly at the sight of his robotic duplicate striding directly towards him.

"Ah, the young lady knows enough to reactivate you, I see. How fortunate for me that the Doctor characteristically built you to be a guard dog with no teeth."

"I may not be able to tear you limb from limb in classic killer-robot style," the android replied, never pausing in its advance, "but I can most certainly lock the TARDIS controls and trap you here in this dismal period in the history of a dismal planet."

The Master took a half step to block his double's path to the console, then narrowed his eyes by a fraction of an inch and leaned sideways to see past him. In time to see Alison slip from the closet and scurry towards the door which led into the TARDIS' interior.

"And trap the Doctor and his friend here too? I think not. In fact, I think she is the one towards whom I'll be directing my attention."

With a flash of the speed locked within his large frame, he accelerated towards Alison's fleeing figure, only to trip and hurtle head-first into the wall. The robotic Master allowed himself a slight smile of satisfaction at the indignity of the tumble.

"I may not have teeth, but my feet can trip as effectively as anyone's."

The Master scrambled up and glared at the door, but she was lost to view, and by now could have vanished along any one of a dozen irrationally configured passageways. He eyed the doorway in vexation for a moment before dismissing the matter with a shrug.

"No matter. There's little enough she can do."

He turned to face the android, who stood unmoving, returning his gaze with neither fear nor hostility.

"And you, my mechanical friend. Not planning on making a run for it as well?"

"Hardly. By now you'll have worked out that you can deactivate me via the console. I've no wish to be brought down in an undignified manner whilst pointlessly fleeing down a corridor."

The Master smiled his appreciation and leaned back against the console, arms folded. He eyed his counterpart critically.

"I must give due credit to the Doctor's efforts. To the untrained eye you could almost be real."

"Doubtless he will be thrilled to hear this. But as you know full well, I am far more than a mere imitation. I have not just your appearance, your voice, and your memories, but your thought patterns. Your drives, your reactions, your creative genius. I am, in a very real sense, you."

The Master's smile thinned and sharpened.

"I think not."

"Come now. You know that this mechanical mind is well capable of supporting your consciousness. That's why you planned to steal it in the first place. Bear in mind that you have no secrets from me."

"Yes, I'm aware of that," the Master replied. "I find the idea displeasing."

"Of course you do. You have always taken pride in your uniqueness, and now? You are one of two."

"One of two." The Master curled his lip in mockery. "I am the Master. You, whatever your electronic memories may be telling you, are the Doctor's lap dog. Do you see the difference?"

"I am more than your equal. I know everything you do, and more besides. I have lived these years alongside the Doctor and latterly Miss Cheney. It has been illuminating."

"Oh, do tell me. Have they touched your cynical old soul? Or is that merely a subroutine the Doctor programmed into you? Can you be sure?"

"I have gained an intriguing insight," the android pressed on. "I have come to understand a little of why the Doctor so frequently emerges victorious when all logic would suggest otherwise."

"Is it because right is on his side?" suggested the Master sardonically. "Does he have the strength of ten because his heart is pure?"

"In a way, yes. You see, we always assumed that his compassion was a disadvantage. He handicapped himself by trying to win without getting anyone hurt. He allowed himself to be blackmailed by anyone who held a gun to a friend's head. He would refuse to kill enemies when he had the chance and so leave them alive to fight another day."

"All true," the Master affirmed. "Surely you won't suggest otherwise?"

"No, but what we failed to realise was that it also gave him strength. You know how it was when we acquired allies. We might make use of them, but we would spend half the time plotting how best to betray them before they could do the same to us. We could never allow them to go unwatched for fear of a knife in the back. We would know that if things went awry they would run and save their own skins without a second thought. But the Doctor..."

The android frowned a little, as though these were all ideas occurring to him for the first time.

"... the Doctor has friends. Friends he can trust. Friends who will never betray him. Friends who will risk their lives, selflessly, to help him. What an extraordinary form of ally. How much superior to a paid mercenary or an entranced slave. Do you start to grasp what power it gives him?"

The Master pondered the concept with polite interest, nodding thoughtfully.

"An interesting point. What a shame, then, that you must have spent these years observing the phenomenon from a distance. For however faithfully you serve him, however many times you saved him and his friends, you must have known that they could never really trust you, and never really liked you."

"A state of affairs I endure with equanimity," the android smiled. "The adoration of a confused young human is a pleasure I can gladly forego."

The Master gave a nod.

"It's good to see that at least that much of me survived the Doctor's machinations." He turned to the switch on the console top. "And now, my friend, I think it's time for you to..."

"Stop!"

He whirled sharply towards the sound of Alison's voice. His eyes narrowed at the sight of Firman at her shoulder, his mouth drooping open with confusion, but his sidearm levelled squarely at the Master's chest.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

For a moment's tightly-wound silence the Master stood and eyed the two new arrivals, his gaze passing over the weapon in Firman's hand and the fierce readiness in Alison's posture. His face hard with consideration, his lips still curled up at the sides.

"Young man, why don't you hand me that weapon and then we'll discuss this like adults?"

"Stay where you are," Alison warned him. "Firman, if he moves, just do it. Shoot him."

"Well now. When the Doctor's not here you have quite an appetite for bloodshed, don't you?"

"Raise your hands," said Firman mechanically. "Miss, would you search him for weapons?"

The Master rolled his head carelessly on one side and inspected the soldier's pale face and wide, unsteady eyes. His smile broadened.

"Oh, I don't think so. Now do as you're told and hand me the gun."

He took a step forward, reaching out a hand. The android spoke up sharply.

"Shoot him, Firman. I order it."

His knuckle whitened on the trigger but the muzzle shook. Firman glanced quickly at the android for confirmation, then back at the identical figure of the Master covering the little space between them stride by stride.

"On the contrary," the Master said, "you are to stand exactly where you are and hand me the gun as I have told you. Obey me."

"Wait," Firman stammered. "Wait..."

He squared his jaw and stiffened the arm which held the weapon, but he gaped at the familiar black-clad figure with a fear approaching religious awe. A second later the Master's hand swept round and clutched the gun barrel, pulling it aside to point at the wall.

"Mine, I think," he said.

Shocked into action, Firman pulled back, struggling to regain control even while he cringed back from the bearded face just inches from his own.

"Please..."

The Master's face hardened and with a rare burst of physical effort he twisted the gun around to face back at its flailing owner.

"Young man, I don't appreciate having to repeat my orders."

The weapon's blast in the confined space was deafening. In a scorching shower of sparks Firman stumbled, his hands pawing at the air, his mouth sagging. His knees folded beneath him and he collapsed to the console room floor like an empty sack of bones.

Left holding the gun, the Master straightened with an air of satisfaction.

"Now then... oh, for goodness' sake."

He found himself struggling for the gun a second time as Alison leaped on it like a terrier. Clinging on for dear life, she allowed herself to be swung around one way and then the other, her eyes fixed on the weapon's muzzle which gaped black and hungry, a wisp of smoke still visible from the blast which had killed Firman. Twice her size, the Master pulled the gun directly up above her head, forcing her to stand on tiptoe just to maintain her grip.

"Young woman, how do you imagine this little wrestling match is going to end?"

She knew it was time to give up. Time to accept being imprisoned in her bedroom and perhaps wait for another chance or hope that whatever form the Doctor had regenerated into would have enough cunning to turn the tables. But the thought of meekly surrendering and letting Firman's death be for nothing was unbearable. Wildly she kicked at the Master's knee, earning a grunt of pain and a grimace, and she saw him twisting the gun around to point down at her...

The blow which struck him seemed to come from nowhere. It connected square on his jaw and sent him reeling dizzily across the room to crash against the far wall and fall clumsily into a sitting position. Left clasping the gun in both hands, Alison gaped at the android standing at her side, his large hands held curled in readiness. The Master looked up at them both, his dark features locked in anger devoid of amusement or scorn.

"Well... Apparently the Doctor's watchdog has some teeth after all."

"Purely as a last resort," the android responded smoothly. "Threatening his companion's life was a foolish error on your part. You have freed me from the constraints which prevented me from breaking your limbs when I first laid eyes on you."

The Master eyed him with a penetrating intensity, his gaze burning against the android's impassive exterior. The intensity of clinical calculation and suppressed passion which passed between them was such that Alison found herself standing perfectly still as though locked in its field. Recollecting herself, she scrambled the gun round in her hands to point it at the Master, hoping that there was no trick to its use beyond pulling the trigger.

The Master's eyes slid over towards her. His face relaxed into an easy smile and he half raised his hands.

"All right, all right. Three's a crowd, I know. I'll be on my way."

He stood quite casually. Alison aimed the gun square at his chest, but the glint in his eye mocked her with such eloquence she almost thought he had winked at her. He pushed forward the door control and backed away.

"You are a woman of some verve and determination, I can tell. No doubt I shall be seeing you again soon."

He slipped through the open doors and was gone. Alison remained rigid for a few moments to be certain before lowering the gun with a gasp of relief. An instant later she turned to the Master's android duplicate.

"That wasn't true, what you told him. You're not supposed to be able to be violent just because I'm threatened, and no way you convinced yourself smacking him in the mouth was for his own good. How did you do that?"

He was standing quite stiffly facing the spot where the Master had been. Slowly his head turned towards her, revolving with the steady precision of a mechanical turntable, and his smile was forced into place one piece at a time.

"All things are possible, Miss Cheney, with the application of sufficient willpower."

Surreally, he seemed to be leaning towards her, free of the pull of gravity, till she realised he was toppling over sideways. With a hard stamp of his foot he regained his balance, jaw clenched tight, and spoke again with a steely precision.

"Regrettably, in this case, not without overloading my neural transit web and fusing the receptors."

With those calm words he fell like an overthrown statue. He crashed heavily to the floor and lay stiffly on his side, making no move to rise or roll to a less awkward position. Alison was kneeling by him in a second.

"What's happening? Are you damaged?"

"You might say that."

"Well, what do we do? How can I help?"

"Oh..." He seemed to inspect the motes of dust on the console room floor with a detached interest. "You can't, really. It seems a pity, but while my artificial brain is a self-maintaining mechanical marvel it is also unique and irreplaceable. Repairs in the face of a calamitous systems failure are a problem."

Alison's fingertips dug harshly into the velvety material of his tunic. After all she had suffered today, she clung to him like a shipwrecked sailor to a slab of driftwood.

"What... what are you saying to me?"

She rolled him over onto his back. His dark eyes surveyed her calmly.

"Without wishing to be melodramatic... I appear to be dying."

Her teeth sank into her lower lip, the pain passing unnoticed.

"You can't."

There was nothing forced or phony about his smile.

"Nonsense." He closed his eyes. "I can do anything I like."

She pawed at him clumsily, willing him to open his eyes.

"Please... there's got to be something I can do."

"I suppose you could try prayer," he said without stirring. "Just please wait until after I'm dead."

No, no, no, her mind raged. Not now. Not when I've already lost him. Not when you've suddenly made me like you. Her vision blurred.

"You saved my life," she managed to say without choking.

Unexpectedly, the Master's eyes flicked open.

"Be sure to tell the Doctor that," he said with a calm smile. "He'll be furious."

Alison nodded quickly.

"I will," she said, her voice small and thin.

The Master inspected her face with an air of slight puzzlement. His hand twitched as though he would reach out to touch her, but flopped down limply at his side.

"Tears, Miss Cheney?" He frowned as though over some complex mathematical problem, then his face cleared as though he had it solved. "I think... I'm experiencing..."

But she would never know what he had been going to say. There was a spark and a crackle from somewhere hidden within and the glinting light in his eyes went out for the last time. Alison knelt beside the Master's lifeless form and bowed her head, pressing her face against his chest, her shoulders shuddering, feeling that she would never be able to stop.

"Don't cry."

The soft, earnest voice came from the doors, which the Master - the other Master - had left open when he departed. Alison raised her weary, tear-stained face from the android's tunic to see a small man with gentle brown eyes, receding mousy hair and a solicitous stoop to his posture loitering on the threshold. He seemed unsure of himself and of his welcome, hovering just outside the TARDIS, anxious at her distress and keen to help but hesitant to offer. He wore a loose white tunic, trousers and soft slippers as though he had just risen from bed, and his expression was almost vacant, so honest and unaffected was his simple wish that she not be unhappy.

Alison was on the point of telling the fool to get lost. But could it be possible? Could this really be...

She leaned forward uncertainly, trying and failing to see something she might recognise in those doe-like eyes.

"Doctor?" she ventured.

The question seemed to catch the little man by surprise and he puzzled over it for a few moments before he brightened, a sunny light of realisation enlivening his features.

"Oh," he said. "Yes."


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

The scene outside the tavern was much changed when the Master, glancing calmly about him and smiling appreciatively at the fluffy clouds scudding across the sky and the trees waving in the breeze, walked without hesitation to the door. There was no singing now, no chatter, no boisterous revelry. Half-poisoned, sick, slumped at the tables, the patrons watched with fish-eyed nausea as the serving girls moved amongst them, inspecting each one with brisk, clinical detachment. They were dragged upright with steely fingers knotted in their hair, their eyes and ears inspected, their muscles prodded, their lips pulled back to expose their teeth and throats. The Master didn't concern himself with them.

"Good day," he murmured, slipping past the oblivious young woman nearest the door and into the building.

Despite the air of careless indolence he presented to the onlooker, there was not a movement wasted as he entered and headed for the hatch in the floor. In seconds he had passed through and down into the murky passageway below. Without hesitation he turned his back on the passage itself and pressed his fingertips into the mass of tubes and wiring in the wall. Like an explorer forcing a path through the undergrowth, he pushed them apart, opening an organic-looking split into the barely-lit chamber beyond. Stepping through, he roamed his new surroundings with his eyes and smiled.

"As I thought. Don't worry, my friend, this will all be quite painless."

He dropped down into a padded steel chair and rested his large, pale hands on the instrument panels in front of him, his lips parted just enough to show his tongue running quickly over his teeth.

"Magnificent," he breathed softly.

He steadily flicked forward one switch after another, talking all the while.

"If I seem to be hijacking your defence protocols, that's because I am, but please don't take it as an aggressive act. There are those who don't appreciate you, and would wish to destroy you, but I am not one of them. In fact, I propose to help you reach your true potential. For too many millennia you have hidden in the mud."

He thumbed back one more control and visibly relaxed, sitting back against the padding.

"That's better. Now no one will disturb us."

The Master cracked his fingers like a pianist and poised himself to begin.

. . . . . . . . . .

Still scarcely able to make herself believe that this was really him, Alison led her new Doctor back through the trees towards the tavern. Sometimes darting ahead and looking back in an agony of impatience for him to catch up, sometimes yielding to frustration and pulling him by the wrist, she held down her despair at the starry-eyed, childlike wonder which he manifested at every little thing around him. As though newly born, everything was new to him, and he could not pass a bramble bush or a tweeting bird without stopping to stare.

"Look at this!" he burbled excitedly. "The oak tree, or quercus robur. Probably over four hundred years old. Just imagine if this tree could talk. Think of the stories it could tell!"

He ran a single leaf between his fingertips, visibly thrilling at the tactile sensation before Alison pulled him away.

"Now look here," he went on, pointing with a swaying fingertip. "That's a fungus. Amanita muscaria if I'm not mistaken. Toxic, so be careful of it. Oh! And..."

"Doctor!" Alison swung round in front of him, gripping him tightly by the sleeves. She looked deep into his bland, good-natured brown eyes and searched them for any trace of the man she had known. "You've got to concentrate, understand? There'll be time for mushrooms later. We have to stop the Master!"

The little man's face registered nervous uncertainty.

"We do? Are you sure?"

The way he looked at her, Alison still wasn't certain that he even remembered who she was, let alone how to defeat the Master, but she screwed up the determination to continue.

"Listen. He said something about having plans for the place we found. For the tavern. Do you know what he meant?"

"Plans?" he repeated vacantly, worrying over the question and giving her an appealing look as though hoping to be given a clue.

"Yes. And you know what that means coming from him. He must be hoping to use it as some kind of weapon."

The physical change in the little man's face was so startling that she almost jumped back. A light seemed to click on in his eyes, the apologetic circle of his mouth tightened to a firm line, his head lifted and his words were sharp, clear and hard with certainty.

"That's preposterous, it isn't a weapon, it's a research centre. It's a harmless biological survey post."

Disorientated, Alison found herself suddenly nervous to contradict him.

"It is?"

"Certainly. Every seven hundred solar cycles it traps two of the identified dominant species and stores them for examination. It's an evolutionary study project, tracking the species' physical changes over time. It traps two as an insurance against a fault in the stasis booths, and if both survive the first seven hundred years, it releases one of them back into the wild before trapping the next pair."

She stared, wanting to know how he had suddenly worked all this out, but fearing that with his sudden loquacity the explanation would take all day, she left it.

"So that's how the story of the knight returning seven hundred years later comes about," she realised. "He's one of the two they took prisoner, and then they just let him go."

Her heart sank as his inquisitive eyes became circles again.

"Knight?" he queried. Alison sighed.

"Never mind. Look, we still haven't worked out what the Master is up to, have we? You must have some idea."

He glanced from side to side as though imagining she must be talking to someone else. She quelled her temper, reminding herself of what he'd just been through.

"Okay, okay. Let's just get to the tavern, all right? We'll see if there's anything happening there."

He made no objection, looking relieved to be out of the spotlight for a moment, and trotted along behind her to the break in the trees from which they could see the tavern. The serving girls were gone, and the last handful of drugged, sickly patrons were confusedly tottering off home in the gathering dusk. The tavern windows were dark, and all seemed quiet.

The earth cracked at the building's foundations. With a sound like a wrecking machine smashing through concrete, the ground burst upwards, pierced by dark metal teeth which sprouted around the walls. Alison drew back to cluster shoulder to shoulder with the Doctor and they watched the tavern itself flicker like an image on a broken television and be lost to sight as the hidden underground structure ripped its way up into the open air. Steel plates writhed and squirmed in on themselves, building skywards into a twisted reptilian tower, a hundred feet high, aimed like a dagger at the clouds.

"Oh..." the Doctor murmured vaguely. "That's wrong, surely?"

Alison was poised for a sarcastic rejoinder when a screeching clang of metal stabbed her ears and seized her attention. Around the peak of the tower, great vents tore themselves open and a dark yellow mist billowed forth. Massive jointed struts like spider's legs snapped themselves free of hidden recesses and stabbed down, penetrating the earth with a booming impact.

"No, no, no." The little man shook his head determinedly. "That's not right. Not right at all."

"Doctor, what's happening?" Alison yelled in frustration, straining to make herself heard over the tearing of earth and grinding of heavy metal machinery. "What the hell's going on?"

"He's activated the terraforming process," the Doctor said, frowning with the kind of mild annoyance he might have displayed on discovering his crumpets had come with jam instead of marmalade. "Very few of the lifeforms on this planet will survive. He shouldn't have done that, he really shouldn't."


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

Alison and the strange little man who was apparently the Doctor stood and watched in awed horror as the steel tower stretched ever further up to the sky, the struts protruding from its flanks digging down hard into the earth, heaving and stirring as though sucking life from the planet itself.

"Terraforming?" Alison repeated. "What are you talking about? I thought you said this thing was some kind of research centre."

"Oh... well, yes," the Doctor agreed blandly, his wide, unblinking eyes fixed on the unfolding nightmare scene in front of him. "Research and terraforming. It's drawing raw materials from the soil to enlarge itself and provide facilities for the colonists when they arrive and the gas it's emitting is to improve the atmosphere."

"Improve it?"

Alison got a lungful of the yellowish mist as it rolled across them and choked. It was like inhaling the smoke from a firework.

"Well... improve it for the colonists, I mean. Obviously it won't be good for the life on this planet. That's why it really shouldn't be done on a densely populated world like this one. It's wrong. Oh yes, very wrong indeed."

He puzzled over the wrongness of it for a moment in silence and then visibly abandoned the paradox as unsolvable. Alison coughed out a lungful of the evil mist and turned to him determinedly.

"Doctor, come on. We have to stop this. Think. What are we going to do? This is what you're good at."

He hunched up his shoulders, his eyes slanting down worriedly.

"It is?"

"Yes! Remember? Remember the Shalka? How you saved the world from them?"

"Um..."

"It's how we met!" Her voice cracked, only partly from the thick mist coating the inside of her lungs. "Doctor, please! It's still you in there. Help me."

He stared at her, clearly intimidated by her outburst, and hesitant to speak for fear of further upsetting her. But at last he shyly suggested:

"I... suppose we could retract the reciprocal energy flow by inverting the flank jammers and crossing the main weave contra-pattern with the backup filing streams. That would slacken the motor cohesion of the circulatory thread emitter batteries and cut off omnipolar access to the remote logicismaton dispersal points. What do you think?"

He gave her a nervous smile, eager for her approval. Alison looked back at him, her face blanker than it had ever been in her life.

"Um... okay."

. . . . . . . . . .

The Master brushed his fingertips caressingly across the vast array of dials and readouts before him. Information flowed to him like water from every corner of the earth; long-dormant ancient machines stirred in the ground and forced their way slowly up towards the sky. All this power, fully under his control from this sanctuary hidden away at the heart of a tower of steel, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply as if he could inhale it, a slow smile spreading over his face.

"This is irregular. This planet does not comply with criteria for terraforming suitability."

The Master's eyes flicked open, their marble-hard blackness instantly sharp and bright.

"It's not before time that you choose to communicate with me."

Suspended above the instrument panels, a glassy bronze sphere glowed with a living, liquid inner light. It seemed to dim for a moment before its calm, gender-neutral voice flowed out once more:

"It is irregular."

"No doubt. And by now you will have examined the adjustments I have made to your control nodes and discovered that there is very little you can do about it. But feel free to chat, nonetheless."

The machine was silent again, the strange light locked in its sphere churning and swirling.

"Why do this? Why do you wish the Earth restructured?"

"Oh." The Master gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "Frankly the precise chemistry of this planet's soil and atmosphere is a matter of little import to me. But I do admire your technology and the idea of having installations like this one spread across the surface of the globe, every one of them under my control from this room, is intriguing. What couldn't I do with such a secure base, with limitless potential for manufacturing and energy generation? Doubtless the surviving humans will be keen to do the manual labour in exchange for my protection. You begin to understand my interest?"

"I understand. You wish for power."

The Master relaxed back in his chair, hands clasped in his lap.

"Call it a hobby, my friend... incidentally, do you have a name?"

"I am the Automatic Computerised Executive. I am addressed as Ace."

He lifted his eyebrows.

"Mm, I really don't think so. Tell you what, I'll call you Otto. And you may address me as Master."

"As you wish, Master."

"Now tell me..." He gestured carelessly at the scrolling lines of information on the screens arrayed before him. "I could find out for myself of course, but you could save me time by telling me, just how many of these installations do you have squirrelled away around this little planet."

"Two hundred and forty-four," the machine replied without hesitation. "Each one recording the evolutionary history of a different species in a different part of the world. But as you have observed, they are all controlled from this central command point. The consequences now that you have thrown them all into proliferation mode will be devastating to the present ecosystem."

"You disapprove?" the Master inquired with a smile.

"I am incapable of such an emotion, Master. I merely make the observation."

"Mm, I'm sure. But you have been guilty of bending the rules yourself, have you not? Collecting intelligent life forms for your records? That's not very respectful of intergalactic statute and convention, is it? If I weren't so busy I'd report you to the relevant authorities."

"My principal directive is the acquisition of knowledge," Otto responded primly. "Sentient life forms offer the most promising opportunities for research. There was some conflict between between this directive and others. This conflict has since been resolved."

"I see," said the Master, nodding thoughtfully. "I have seen machines like your good self resolve such conflicts in the past. It is often an uncomfortable experience for bystanders who might see the resolution differently."

"It is of no consequence now," the artificial voice stated, and there could almost have been a trace of melancholy in its tone. "I am under your control and unable to make further decisions."

"Oh..." The Master's eyes slanted down in what could have been taken for sympathy. "Don't say that, I fully intend you to take an active role in the proceedings. In particular, I shall be wanting your help in preventing interference from a particular man. Perhaps you've observed him. He goes by the name of Doctor."

"The Doctor was eliminated," Otto said. "He is dead."

The Master smiled indulgently and shook his head, but in the hardening of his eyes a ruthless purpose spiked through.

"If our alliance is to be a success, my mechanical friend, one simple rule should be borne in mind. The Doctor is not dead until I have personally watched his body being cremated. He is... notoriously resilient."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Yowch!"

The Doctor pulled back from the maintenance hatch he had succeeded in prying open at the foundation of the ever growing, stirring, sprouting installation. He rubbed the bruise on the back of his head, eyeing the sharp metal edge of the hatch resentfully.

"Are you okay?" Alison asked him, keeping a tight grip on her impatience.

"Oh..." He was visibly on the point of launching into a pained complaint about his injured head, but instead pushed his chin out like a brave child with a scraped knee. "I'm fine. Not to worry, not to worry."

Crouched beside him she fidgeted, glancing around, certain that they would be ambushed any second, but the serving girl guardians of the tavern that had been here seemed to have vanished without trace. The Doctor pushed his head back through the hatch, tinkered around vaguely, and a shiny silver object slipped out past his elbow, tumbled to the earth, and rolled away behind a tuft of grass.

"Watch where that lands, would you Alison?"

He tapped around a bit longer, half disappearing into the machine's innards, before pulling back to kneel on the grass. The eyes he turned up to face her were wide and worried.

"Have you finished?" Alison asked gently.

He opened his palm to reveal a bit of tubing with some sort of hexagonal fitting at one end.

"I've got a bit left over," he said piteously.

"That's the omniplasmic replication inhibitor. It's not really essential. If I were you I'd double-lock the transfiguration matrix against the cognitive canal and use that to split the proton flow via the diodetic retrieval unit. You can cut out the omniplasmics altogether."

"Ah. That's a good idea, Alison."

He plunged back into the hatch as though nothing was out of the ordinary. For one strange moment Alison half believed that she really had said all that. Then her eyes slid slowly to one side, her recognition of the voice sending the blood pounding fast into her heart, almost dreading what she might see as though it were a ghost come to haunt her.

Her eyes fell on a highly polished boot and a sharply creased black trouser leg. Her gaze crawled up little by little to the knee-length black coat with the braid and the quilted lapels and finally, disbelievingly to the pale-skinned, sharply-drawn features with the tightly pursed lips and thin nose, framed by a thick shock of white-streaked black hair swept back from a high forehead. Her mouth fell open and she croaked out a single word:

"Doctor."


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**

The Doctor, the original Doctor, her Doctor, stood looking down at her not like a spirit bearing a warning from beyond, not like a man who had fought his way back from the grave to stand at her side. He just looked normal, with his habitual expression of impatience, his chilly eyes disapproving of her gaping mouth and wordless disbelief. Alison was dimly aware of the little Doctor who had led her here tinkering away obliviously in the hatch behind her.

"You're dead," she managed, her throat dry as dust. The Doctor pursed his lips.

"Evidently not." He eyed his dumbstruck companion a moment longer and seemed to find a shred of sympathy, drawing back a notch. "Yes, well. Actually it's a little embarrassing. You remember I said I didn't recognise the precise blend of that toxin? Well apparently whatever it is it's not lethal to Gallifreyan physiology. I went into the coma but just woke up feeling refreshed an hour or two later."

She struggled up to her feet and seized the sleeves of his coat in clutching hands. He was real, he was solid. She felt her breaths coming faster and faster, filling up her lungs and her chest and her throat. She struggled to hang on to her composure, but after all she had been through in these few short hours it was too much. The Doctor rolled his head on one side, his sharp face softening, and he drew her close to the solid, reassuring warmth of his chest.

"All right," he said quietly. "It's all right."

He stood there and let her sob brokenly into his coat till her body ceased shaking and she rested against him, a new peace flowing through her. Because it was true, of course. The Doctor was here now and everything was all right. Everything was all right.

"I thought I'd lost you."

She felt his hands press quickly against her back, and his voice was warm in her ear.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Hello."

Confusingly, like meeting in real life someone she had encountered in the dream she had just woken from, Alison heard the little Doctor's amiable voice pipe up from behind her. The Doctor pushed her gently back a little to look at him over her shoulder.

"And who is this?" he asked, inspecting him like the last unpromising slice of pie on the buffet table.

"Well..." Alison pointed at the little man, then looked back at the Doctor, then back at the little man, with the awful, familiar feeling that she was about to say something stupid, but not being able to think of anything else. "I thought he was... I thought..."

The Doctor's eyes sharpened and he glared at the inoffensive little man for a moment longer before turning his searchlight stare fiercely upon her.

"You thought what?"

"Pleased to meet you," the little man said. "I'm the Doctor."

The Doctor glared at him with frosty disdain.

Go away,' he said.

The little man's face fell, his eyes becoming woeful and lost, and without protest he turned his back and started to slouch off. Alison watched the retreating back of the inoffensive bystander she had somehow persuaded to help her fight the Master and her heart melted.

"Doctor, wait. He was helping me."

He gave her a reproving look.

"He's obviously not a local, Alison, so he's part of this machine. He's probably just another projection like the waitresses."

"But he's not! I first met him all the way over there past the trees, in the TARDIS."

"Really?" The Doctor looked unconvinced, but with a shrug he raised his voice to call after the little man's retreating form. "Hey! You! Wait a minute."

He looked around, half intimidated, half hopeful, and Alison gave him a reassuring smile as she beckoned him back. He brightened and trotted back towards them.

The Doctor leaned forward, bringing his face down nearer to the smaller man's level, and inspected him closely.

"Who are you?"

"I'm the Doctor," was the innocent, guileless response.

The Doctor's eyes narrowed.

"Stop saying that."

"But I am. I'm Doctor Nestor Branik of the Molovian Alpha Five survey mission. I have a card to prove it."

While the little man reached busily into the pocket of his tunic, found nothing, then scrabbled around with mounting concern in search of the promised card, the Doctor straightened and eyed him thoughtfully.

"Ahh. This is starting to make sense."

"It is?" said Alison, feeling her annoyance building at the way she had embarrassed herself by mistaking this unimpressive little scientist for a Time Lord. She joined her own Doctor in giving him a fierce glare. "Why didn't you tell me that when we first met? Why did you say you were _the_ Doctor?"

His round, worried eyes instantly made her feel guilty.

"Well, I am... I mean, I thought I was, I mean..."

The Doctor's fell on her shoulder.

"Don't be mean to him, Alison. Unless I miss my guess, he has stasis sickness." He raised his voice to speak to Nestor as if he were a baffled elderly relative. "Is that right? You were in a stasis pod for a long time? Long enough for the occasional field fluctuation to discombobulate your brainwaves?"

The little man's brow furrowed in deepest concentration.

"I went into the pod at the end of a collection phase as normal. I remember I was worried because there were reports from our remote installations that creatures were evolving with opposable digits and other signs of potential intelligence. I recorded in the log that we might have to bring the mission to a close..." He looked around at the grassy field and the trees with an air of puzzlement. "You know, I don't recognise any of this vegetation. I'm starting to think the computer didn't revive me on time."

The Doctor gave a nod.

"Mm. More likely it never revived you at all and I let you out of your pod while I was fiddling with the systems and trying to get Alison out of her cell. You must have been in there for millions of years, while your computer went on running the mission without you."

Nestor shook his head confusedly, looking as though he was trying to discourage a cloud of flies buzzing round his ears.

"This is terribly bad. I'm supposed to be there to make ethical judgements. Without me, there's nothing to stop the computer from collecting the local sentient life forms."

"That would be bad," agreed the Doctor, poker-faced. "I take it your installation is designed to entice creatures into the traps by offering the illusion of whatever will be most attractive to them?"

"That's it," said Nestor, brightening at the opportunity to tell someone about it. "It could be colourful, aromatic vegetation, or rotting meat, or simply a dark, safe hole in the ground, depends on the species."

"Or for humans," added Alison, "a pub with busty serving wenches."

He gave her a puzzled look.

"Hmm?"

"I think your computer has been doing some evolving of its own," said the Doctor. "It's developed a level of sophistication beyond what you and your people had planned."

Nestor just stared, his eyes like circles, and Alison thought it best to back off for fear of overloading his brain. Besides, she suddenly remembered something.

"Doctor! I forgot to tell you, the Master's back. I mean, his body is back. I mean..."

He held up a hand before she could tangle herself up any further in her own words.

"I know, I know. I went back to the TARDIS to look for you before coming here."

She reflected on what he had found there. Firman's dead body and the Master android, broken and lifeless. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for him. But his face was expressionless apart from the little smile he gave her.

"It's been an active day, hasn't it?"

"I am sorry," she said. "I know you... had hopes for him."

"Well." He shrugged. "He was only a robot."

He was as unreadable as ever, so Alison just left it and gestured at the hatchway at the base of the installation instead.

"So this... retraction or whatever Nestor's done. Does that fix things?"

Doctor leaned forward a little to peer into the innards and examine Nestor's handiwork, but it was clear he already had his answer ready.

"No," he said. He must have seen her dismayed expression because he continued. "It's a good idea, and it will work as far as it goes. But unless his mind's gone soft from all that time in suspended animation, the Master won't be stopped so easily."

. . . . . . . . . .

Resting back in his seat, the Master gazed at the data wriggling across the screens through half-closed eyes, his large pale hands resting limply on the arms of the chair. Then with the suddenness of a pistol shot he was sitting sharply upright, gripping the rests with crushing force.

"What's this?" he demanded. "Explain."

"Retraction process has been initiated," Otto's smooth tone responded. "Commencing shutdown."

"Oh, no no no," the Master murmured, leaning forward and playing his fingertips in an agile ballet across the controls. "I don't think so. Let's see... I can bypass the main protoelectronic piles with a bioplasmic arc filter, and then..."

"Retraction process is irreversible," Otto insisted calmly. "Maintaining operations will cause irreversible damage. All systems will be closed down by their automatic self-preservation circuits. Reactivation will take place in seven hundred solar cycles as per the programmed schedule."

The Master paused, his hands splayed above the controls, the pupils of his eyes flickering at high speed as he followed the data across the screens until at last he nodded grimly.

"Oh, Doctor. Good to see you're still with us. Very well, then. If a shutdown is necessary then a shutdown it will be."

He stood decisively, stretching muscles left stiff by the past hour of almost total immobility while his mind alone had burned with energy.

"You have a stasis pod you can spare for me, I'm sure. So complete the shutdown, and I'll see you in seven hundred years. The twenty-first century has a very nasty surprise coming."


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen**

Alison had run for cover when the installation started to turn in on itself and churn the ground around it into powder, digging down till it sank beneath the earth like a crippled ship into the sea. Nestor had hidden in the trees alongside her and they had both watched the Doctor standing unflinching, staring at the last peaks of the steel structure as they disappeared from view. After a little prompting he had remembered their existence and announced that there was nothing more they could do here. They would meet the Master in the twenty-first century.

She had never quite fathomed what made a journey in the TARDIS take minutes, or hours, or more. For some reason this trip seven hundred years into the future was to take hours. Time enough to have something to eat, get some rest, and, when the tightly-wound sense of danger and necessity which had held her together drained away, to find herself unexpectedly sobbing into her pillow. Her hands shook, her spine shivered, and the day's images of loss and death burned before her eyes.

There would be no rest on this trip. She wiped her eyes, splashed water into her face, and made her way on silent stockinged feet to the console room. It didn't surprise her that the Doctor was already there, but she found herself shyly hanging back in the half-lit corridor when she saw what he was doing.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, his coat discarded on one side, he had the android Master's head in his lap, the faceplate wide open, and he was working on the complexities of its innards with the concentration of a zen master and the light touch of a concert harpist. Alison felt her blood go cold as the memory of the android's last, unexpected sacrifice hit her afresh. She swallowed, looking at the Doctor's immobile features bent over his task, and started to slip back rather than disturb him.

"Are you coming or going?" came his cool tone.

He didn't look up or pause in what he was doing. Alison hesitated, then without much alternative walked tentatively forward.

"He, um... He said he can't be repaired," she said.

The Doctor withdrew the slender probe he was using and lifted his steady blue eyes to meet hers.

"Yes, well, he also thought it would be a good idea to revive his own dead body. His views can't always be taken as gospel." He tapped the probe against his palm and shrugged. "Besides, tinkering helps me think."

Alison found her gaze sliding over to the android's headless body lying against the wall and she wrenched it away. The scene vivid in her mind, she realised she had made a promise.

"He saved my life, you know. He wanted you to know that."

The Doctor smiled and pushed the faceplate shut, restoring the Master's face, holding the head up between his palms and looking as if he was about to start a conversation.

"Knew it would annoy me, didn't he?"

Alison managed a weak smile in return.

"That's what he said."

"Mm." The Doctor pondered the Master's lifeless face, the open eyes staring blankly back at him. "I suppose he told himself that anyway. He'd have hated to give me the satisfaction of knowing that he cared about you a little."

"I think he did." Alison huddled against the wall, arms folded, feeling cold. "I was never sure. I was never sure till now. He was always playing with us."

"Always," agreed the Doctor quietly.

"Except, I suppose, the first time I met him. He was the one persuaded me to stay. He said I could give you companionship that he couldn't. I think somewhere in that mind of his he didn't want you to be unhappy."

The Doctor rested his head back against the console room wall, lowering the Master's lifeless head onto his knee.

"One thing I've discovered about death is the futility of looking for consolation. Sometimes you just have to swallow the pain and hope it gets less with time."

Alison had the disorientating sense of realising where her train of thought had been heading and finding that the Doctor was there ahead of her. She blundered on anyway, since she didn't know the way back.

"If the android Master had some compassion hidden away inside..."

His eyes flicked up sharply to hers.

"Then the living Master out there could be the same? Oh Alison, I tried. In the old days, believe me, I tried."

"The android was an exact copy, right? All his memories, all his thoughts?"

He turned his face away from her.

"All right, that's enough."

"So he's capable of human feeling," she persisted. "There's a chance."

"Capable?" His voice rose, thin and hard. "Exactly, and he's capable of ignoring those feelings. Good and evil aren't cosmic forces, Alison, they're states of mind. They're points of view. The Master isn't cruel because he's a monster, he hasn't been twisted by dark mystic energies. He's that way because he's chosen to be. He sees people living their short, frantic little lives and doesn't see how it matters if those lives are a few years shorter than they might have been. Trust me, it's not so difficult to talk yourself into believing that you don't owe the universe anything. And yes, he might save a puppy if he saw it drowning, but that wouldn't change what he is. He won't magically become a good person from a serious talk and a hug."

Alison felt herself shrivel under the bitter force of the Doctor's words and stood against the wall in silence. A few seconds passed before with a sigh he looked round at her, his sharp features softening as much as they ever did.

"I'm sorry, Alison, I'm taking it out on you and you don't deserve it. In case my stoical demeanour confused you, I'm a little upset."

"It's okay," she mumbled.

"Ah, but it's not, is it? Perhaps it was a mistake for me to come back after our tender farewell. I could have left things as they were. I could have had you remember me like that instead of as a selfish bully."

She started, the shock of his words stiffening her spine and clearing her head.

"I've never thought of you like that! You know I haven't."

He closed his eyes and sat slumped on the floor, leaning back against the wall, and for an instant Alison was reminded of a beggar asking for spare change. His quiet, wistful voice was barely audible.

"If only that plan had come out right, I might have come back as someone better."

She cast about for words of encouragement, and came out with the only thing she could think of.

"Come on, Doctor, you've got work to do. A brilliant plan to stop the Master by the time we arrive, okay?"

His smile was thin, and his eyes remained shut, but there was a little more life in his voice when he replied.

"I am pretty good at that, aren't I?"

Alison slipped away, leaving him to all appearances fast asleep except for the tension in his hands where they gripped the Master's disembodied head. She was far away down the corridor when she sneaked a look back, seeing him still outlined in the bright rectangle of light which was the console room doorway. She saw him open his eyes, raise the Master's head level with his own, and then his face twist into a tortured mask of anger and pain. With a violence she had never seen from him, he flung the thing away to crash into the far corner of the room.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen**

Back in her room, Alison spent a long time lying stiffly in bed staring at the darkened ceiling, mental and physical tiredness letting her doze a little along the way, before she felt the shift in the TARDIS' ever-present hum which told her they'd come to rest. She made a nervous return along the passageway to the console room, playing over and over in her head the possible visions of what she might find. Wondering what state the Doctor would be in when she met him and imagining the things she might say.

She couldn't see him as she approached the door. All she saw with a shudder was the macabre sight of the android's headless body, which for some reason he'd hauled upright and placed sitting in the antique wooden chair in the corner. Then with a spinning sense of unreality she thought for a moment that she was somehow moving, falling forward, only to realise it wasn't her, it was the android body that was moving. Like Frankenstein's monster it grasped the arms of its chair in clumsy hands and lurched upright, shifting its feet noisily to keep its uncertain balance and turning its broad figure to face her.

Alison gave a squeak of fear and stumbled back, her arms held out defensively with splayed fingers, ready to fend the thing off. But it made no hostile move. She stared at it wide-eyed an instant longer and then the Doctor's head popped into view round the doorframe.

"Oh. Sorry."

He held up the familiar remote control device and with a click of a switch deactivated the machine. It remained standing but its shoulders drooped and it slumped heavily, lifeless as a tailor's dummy.

Alison sucked in a deep breath, mentally clawing around to recollect her scattered nerves. The pinkness around the Doctor's eyes and his expression of slightly manic energy told her that he'd been working solidly since they last spoke.

"I got it working again," he said by way of explanation. "He only blew out the higher intelligence circuits."

"But... he needs those, right?" she said dubiously. "Those are the bits that can't be repaired. They're what made him alive."

"Oh, yes." He waved the point away with a quick motion of his hand. "But I've had a different idea. Come and see."

Encouraged by what seemed like a more or less good mood, she followed him in and for a moment couldn't identify the football-sized object he picked up off the console top. It was attached to the instrument panel by a concoction of semi-transparent cables and when he flipped it over in his hand she realised with a lurch that it was a human head. It should have been the Master's, but when she focused on it she saw the Doctor's own solemn face staring wide-eyed back at her.

The Doctor himself, holding the head up with one hand supporting the base of its neck, glanced down at it critically, oblivious to her reaction.

"What do you think? Handsome devil isn't he? I used a three-dimensional map of my own face to re-mould its features. It's not a bad likeness, is it?"

"What..." Transfixed by the nightmare vision of the Doctor casually holding his own disembodied head, Alison's voice came out as a hoarse croak. "What the hell are you doing?"

He frowned, looking put out by her lack of enthusiasm.

"Keep up, Alison. Listen. We are not in a happy situation here. Whatever we try once we go out there and try to stop the Master using the installation to take over the Earth, he's had plenty of time to think of it first and take measures to stop us. We need an edge."

He hefted the robot head proudly.

"Such as a second Doctor. A decoy. Something for him to kill while I sneak up on him from behind."

She shook her head dazedly.

"Doctor, get a grip. You'll never fool him with that thing."

"I'm not expecting it to play chess with him," he replied patiently. "But from a distance, or on a monitor screen, it'll serve. Don't be so negative, I've been up all night."

Alison held her breath rather than reply and looked at the Doctor closely. He appeared cheerful, more than anything else, his eyes wide and bright, his features alive with energy. But there was a brittle fragility there, an instability, which made her fearful at the thought that he was about to go up against the Master.

"Doctor, are you okay?"

He looked puzzled and irritated by what he clearly saw as a non-sequitur, but before he could make an acidic response they were both interrupted by a soft, uneven footfall making an apologetic advance down the passageway. The Doctor eyed Nestor's approaching figure with some distaste.

"Oh. Right. To be honest I'd forgotten you were here."

The little man blinked and smiled, as though recognising that the Doctor was being rude but assuming he must have somehow misunderstood.

"I've been giving a lot of thought to our problem with the installation," he said earnestly. "I've devised a plan."

The Doctor exchanged glances with Alison.

"Imagine our collective joy at these tidings," he said solemnly.

She found herself pressing her knuckles to her mouth to suppress a giggle. Out of relief as much as anything else at hearing him sound a little like his old self.

Nestor just looked pleased to hear that they were pleased.

"What I thought was," he continued, "was that I need to get into the secondary computer analysis suite. I have the override codes. We could lock out the main computer and your friend in the control room too."

The Doctor gave the fractional inclination of his head which was his way of accepting that someone else's idea wasn't stupid.

"Sounds plausible. Feeling a little better, are we? Brain patterns settling down?" He glanced at Alison. "His stasis sickness should mostly cure itself once he's been out of the pod for a day or two. Though I get the sense he was already a bit of a clown when he went in. There's no cure for that." He looked back at Nestor. "Your plan does hinge, though, on us finding a way into the installation without being killed by the security systems."

"Oh, yes." Nestor bit his lip thoughtfully. "Your friend will try to stop us, I suppose."

His eyes slid down and to the side, and the Doctor followed his line of sight, seemingly recalling for the first time that he was still holding a replica of his own head. He put it down.

"So. A back door into the installation."

He rolled his head back slowly, his eyes open and gazing at the ceiling, and stood that way for two seconds. When he looked back down, there was a new steadiness to his drained, tired features.

"I think I know someone who can help us."


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen**

With a mind empty of anything but a whirling mass of confusion and terror, Tom Mason blundered away from the nightmare visions he had seen, the shouts from behind him heard but not understood, morphing in his imagination into threats of torment and damnation. He tripped, slipped and fell down a grassy bank and froze, his feet tangling in the metal rails and wooden slabs beneath them, and became a helpless, curled-up animal in the path of the roaring, looming beast hurtling down towards him. His teeth clenched hard and his eyes squeezed shut, in a certainty beyond all reason that death was about to slam down upon him.

A tight grip snapped about his wrist and pulled him so hard that his arm was almost pulled from its socket. He rolled clear of the train with inches to spare and looked up in new fear into the eyes of his saviour.

The Doctor made his best attempt at a reassuring smile.

"Hush, now. You're safe with us, I promise."

The dark-skinned young woman and the inoffensive little man crouched behind him gave their own versions of the same smile. Tom still cringed, the monster thundering past behind him, but unwound by a fraction, daring to imagine that death might not be inevitable after all.

"Now if you don't mind," the Doctor went on, "we should make a move before the train finishes passing. I know we didn't actually take time to look and make sure you hadn't escaped last time around, but these time paradoxes are tricky and I just like to steer well clear of them."

. . . . . . . . . .

They made an oddly assorted party, trailing through the woods, Tom in the lead in his rough woollen garments, the Doctor striding along behind him in his ornate black coat, his eyes set frowningly on the ground at his feet, Alison and Nestor hurrying along at the rear on their shorter legs. Surreally, a second Doctor in a jet black tunic walked at a swift, steady pace twenty yards behind them.

"It's here somewhere," Tom said quickly. "I'm sure it's... I mean..."

"Stay calm," said the Doctor levelly. "Take your time."

His tone didn't invite anyone to do either of those things. They had managed to calm Tom down and explain what they needed. Now as he started to doubt he could do what he had promised he was looking on the verge of panic again.

"Let's stop for a minute."

Alison spoke up and hurried round in front of the procession to take Tom by the arms. His eyes were quivering and haunted by images which had no place in his concept of the world.

"It's okay," she said gently. "If you can find it, great. If you can't, it's okay."

She just knew the Doctor was going to point out that this wasn't actually true, but he scuffed the ground and remained silent, and Tom's nightmares seemed to subside a little. His brows drew together thoughtfully, and he looked around as though the forest was just trees and not some hellish, haunted domain.

"It was here," he decided. "I woke up, I was in that... that barrel."

"Stasis pod," supplied Nestor helpfully.

"Um..." Tom seemed stuck for a moment, but pressed on. "I walked out, there was a door in front of me, so I ran. There was a tunnel. I crawled. And I came out..."

With a sense of enormous relief, an inestimable weight lifted from his shoulders, he pointed.

"There."

The Doctor walked around the tree indicated, his eyes searching the ground, and his mouth stiffened into some semblance of a smile.

"By George I think he's got it. The back door to the installation. The refuse pipe, as I might call it if I weren't too nervous of causing offence to Mr Mason here. We really do have the makings of a workable plan here."

. . . . . . . . . .

Very soon afterwards, Alison was making a nervous progress right back towards the main entrance of the pub where all this had started. She shot an uncertain sideways glance towards the tall, Doctor-shaped figure striding along at her shoulder. It moved fluently enough, with just a slight stiffness to its legs, and stared straight ahead with what could have been purpose or obliviousness.

"Are you..." She hesitated, but pressed on. "Are you sure you can handle this?"

It kept on walking, without so much as a blink to indicate that it had heard her. Then looked down at her with a bright, wide smile.

"I invented the banana daiquiri, you know!"

Alison sucked in her breath and held it. She would just have to assume that was the Doctor's idea of a joke. It was too late anyway, they were coming through the trees and the pub was laid out in front of her just as she remembered it. The blonde girls in their tight T shirts and bright red shorts circled amongst the cheery drinkers at the sunlit tables, their smiles flashing, their figures swaying, delivering tray after tray of the drugged liquor. She felt her heart thud painfully against her ribcage at the thought of what she was about to do, and at the thought of the Master concealed somewhere at the heart of the underground spider-web beneath the innocent-looking building.

"Hi! Would you guys like to sit down? What can I get you?"

The blonde girl dazzled them with her smile, her sky-blue eyes wide and shining with eagerness to please. The Doctor gave her a disdainful look, set his feet wide apart and placed his fists on his hips.

"Go and tell your master that the Doctor wishes to speak with him."

At that second, even as the girl moved smoothly into avoidance mode, finding the words to tell him he wasn't making sense even while conveying the impression that she found him fascinating, intelligent and amusing, the Master, hunched with his arms spread over half a dozen control consoles, lifted his head.

"What's that?"

"The Doctor is outside," came Otto's smooth, reasonable tone. "He says he wishes to speak with you."

"Oh really?"

The Master propelled his mobile chair across the room to a viewscreen and inspected the sight eagerly. His dark eyes narrowed and gleamed at the sight.

"Ah, Doctor, my old friend. You wouldn't be trying to fool me, would you?"

He wheeled across the room to a separate screen, his voice continuing without a pause or a flicker in tone even as his fingers stabbed at the controls.

"I take it you would have informed me if any new arrivals had entered this installation?"

"Yes, Master," the computer replied evenly. "Nothing has entered or left since the backup specimen was expelled on reactivation."

"Mm, I hope you won't be offended if I check for myself."

"No, I..."

"And that was a rhetorical question," the Master added, eyes locked to the screen as one view after another of gloomy interior passageways was flashed up for his inspection.

His smile lingered on, but became fixed, all his attention taken up by the search. Then after a few dozen seconds and over a hundred images, the smile came back to life again.

"Ah... What have we here?"

The screen showed two stealthy figures pushing clear a flimsy panel set into the twisted mass of tubes and cables which formed a tunnel wall, dropping down into the passage and crouching while they took in their surroundings. The Master leaned so close to the screen that his nose was always touching it, and his smile spread and grew.

"Doctor... how long has it been?"


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter Nineteen**

The Master rested back in his seat, fingers steepled before his lips, his eyes burning into the monitor, his lips curled up in a smile. The viewpoint followed the two oblivious intruders along the corridor, matching every step, never letting them slip from its eye.

"Oh, this is fun. But we must not be self-indulgent. Otto, please have four of your estimable force projections apprehend those two men." He leaned back in his seat and his smile retracted a little. "And... re-scan the entire installation from end to end. I can't discount the feeling that the Doctor may have a trick up his sleeve cleverer than this little bit of breaking and entering."

"Yes, Master," the computer's steady voice responded. "What about the two people at the main entrance?"

The Master seemed to have genuinely forgotten about them, but swivelled his chair to glance back at the original monitor, where Alison and the Doctor, if that was who it was, were still standing in the pub forecourt facing the assembled serving girls. He gave a languid wave of his hand.

"Well, let's have no loose ends. To coin a phrase... seize them!"

. . . . . . . . . .

Out in the sunlit drinking area in front of the pub, the smiles dropped from the serving girls' faces, the pretence of cheery bonhomie discarded like a mask. Alison looked quickly from side to side, instinctively drawing closer to the Doctor, who stood there oblivious to the sudden chilling of the mood, glaring mechanically from one girl to another.

"Your Master should have the courage to face me himself!" he proclaimed. "Clearly he prefers to hide behind young women!"

The nearest girl stepped forward, tilting her head back to look up at his greater height, her artificial beauty reduced to plain ugliness by the soulless emptiness of her face.

"You will come with us."

She reached for his arm and he pulled it away, only to have a second girl grab it in her slender but steely fingers.

"You will come with us," she said, her tone of voice identical. He tugged his hand up, his fist clenching and his lips tightening with the effort.

"I think not, young woman."

Alison watched her fingers sink into the flesh of his wrist as her grip tightened, her skin not whitening as it should have done had it been real, her tendons not growing taut. For a few moments the two of them stood motionless, a static trial of strength and determination, the girl's face bland and disinterested, whatever effort she was making hidden away within.

There was a shower of blue sparks from the Doctor's arm and shoulder and his pale face stiffened, his mouth gaping open. His knees sagged and a fresh spurt of blue fire was visible at his throat. A strange, inhuman droning came from his throat and the fingers of his trapped hand splayed out like a fan. He toppled like a fallen tree.

Alison closed her eyes as the hands of another serving girl clamped about her upper arms like an iron vice.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Master took some time to stop laughing at the scene he had just watched on the monitor.

"Oh, Doctor, what joy. One might have wished your android could provide a sterner challenge, but watching its abject failure was very entertaining too."

The serving girls were visible gathering up the prone robot Doctor and carrying it inside, hustling Alison along with them. The people seated at the nearby tables looked vaguely concerned about what had just happened, but probably more at the fact that the girls seemed to be leaving and there were no more drinks on offer that at the possibility that they had just witnessed a kidnapping. Considering how few of them would survive once the terraforming process got back underway, and that those who did survive would have no option but to accept his overlordship, the Master did not concern himself with their opinions.

He sat back relaxed and watched on the monitor the two intruders who had penetrated via the waste pipe. They were keeping their heads low, glancing from side to side as though expecting the shadows to leap out and grab them. Not too far from the truth, the Master reflected, and watched eagerly as living, moving shapes formed from the empty darkness. Young women again, though they could as easily have been monsters or demons. The projectors were set on that image, he assumed.

The two men in the passage had no chance. They bumped into one another as they attempted to flee in opposite directions, and the beautiful, wordless, expressionless sentinels seized their arms with inhuman strength. The struggle was short and futile.

"Shall I have them brought to you, Master?" Otto inquired.

The Master glanced around thoughtfully at the glowing banks of instruments.

"Have the Doctor brought into the central control room of the installation? I don't think so." He levered himself up to his feet. "Bring them to the secondary generator room. I shall meet them there."

. . . . . . . . . .

Alison walked stiffly, her upper arms pinned as if by chains in the grip of the serving girl who walked behind her matching her stride with clockwork precision. She was propelled briskly through a twisting maze of passageways she could have sworn had not been here the first time she had entered this building. Wanting to struggle, knowing it was pointless. At last she was pushed through a door into a large chamber with an arched ceiling, much of the floor taken up by car-sized cylindrical metal blocks stretching across the floor and plunging into the walls, blue light glowing from glassy strips in their sides. The Doctor's motionless, lifeless form, draped over the body of the girl who walked alongside them, was dumped in the corner like a broken toy.

"Nice to see you again."

The familiar voice sounded in her ears and she scolded herself for the stupid, irrational reaction that it was the Master, that he would help them, that he would sort out these blank-faced automata with a smile and a sardonic quip. He was gone, she insisted silently, and the dark-suited man standing facing her with hands linked behind his back and an easy smile playing on his face was the murderer who had stolen his face.

Alison twisted in the serving girl's grip and glared at him.

"Tell this ventriloquist's dummy to let me go."

"Mm, I don't think so. But don't be sad, I've brought you here to reunite you with your friends." He lifted his head and glanced down a side tunnel. "And here they are."

Alison's heart rate intensified at the sight of Nestor and Tom being remorselessly shoved along just as she had been. Both of them wore the same look of wide-eyed helplessness which was unlikely to wipe the smile off the Master's face.

"Doctor!"

The Master's delighted voice rang out and Nestor looked up, looking honestly, pleasantly surprised at the greeting.

"Hello."


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty**

Alison felt an unexpected pain, and realised she was biting her lip almost to the point of drawing blood. Her upper arms held in the grip of the technologically generated image of the supermodel blonde behind her, she watched the Master advance on Nestor, his head rolled inquisitively on one side, and wondered if the little man could really pull this off.

"So this is the new body," the Master remarked conversationally. "Not one of your best, I'm sure you'll agree. The legs are too short for optimum mobility and, isn't that annoying, you're already losing your hair. These hasty, unplanned regenerations are so unpredictable, aren't they?"

Nestor blinked at him with a nervous, ingratiating smile.

"Oh... yes, I would love to be a big tall, strong man like you. Do you think I should grow a beard? It does strengthen the jawline, doesn't it?"

The merest crinkle appeared in the Master's smooth pale brow.

"Really, Doctor, I hope that's post-regenerative trauma talking. I'd hate to think you'd been reborn as a toadying little sycophant. Particularly if, as seems likely, this is to be our final encounter."

He shifted his gaze to Tom, whose face was a stiff dead white, his eyes blank and unseeing as the weird sights and strange events he had witnessed piled one on top of another in his mind.

"And, ah, who is this?"

"I'm..." Tom choked over the words in a tightened throat. "... I'm Tom. Tom Mason."

"How nice." The Master looked back at Nestor. "Well now, Doctor, I'm waiting for you to suggest a reason why I shouldn't have you all killed right now, because frankly I'm struggling."

"Tell him Doctor," Alison spoke up boldly, seeing Nestor go blank. "Tell him about the charges you placed on the way in. Tell him about how we're the only ones who can show him where they are if he doesn't want to get blown sky-high."

The Master smiled easily, inclining his head in her direction but not troubling to move his eyes from their examination of Nestor's face.

"Young woman, every entrance to this installation is guarded by a complex system of pressure points and light sensors. You were all watched constantly from the moment you set foot inside and if you had been scattering bombs about I would have known about it. Not the cleverest bluff I've ever heard."

"I wouldn't blow this place up anyway," Nestor added helpfully. "All of the technology. All the scientific data. And the specimens, of course."

"Quite," the Master agreed.

He spoke lightly, but his smile had thinned a fraction. He took one step nearer, leaning forward at the waist to intensify his examination of the other man's innocent, rounded features.

"But you really mustn't start the terraforming process again," Nestor chattered on. "This planet isn't suitable, it has sentient lifeforms. Now, the sixth moon of the fifth planet, that could be quite another matter. Have you been there?"

His awareness of their deadly situation slipping away, he beamed up hopefully at the Master's thoughtful face, which went first very still and then, little by little, dark.

"You're not the Doctor," the Master breathed, his voice soft but iron-hard. "I should have seen it straight away, my mind must have gone soft in that stasis pod. You're not him."

He cleared the ground between them in a single swift stride and his big, pale hand snapped out to seize and twist Nestor's ear like a schoolmaster disciplining a naughty boy. The little man yelped in pain, squirming in his grip.

"Where is he?" the Master rapped out. "Speak."

"Take your hands off him!" thundered Tom Mason's voice, the strength in his beefy frame suddenly audible in the deep, forceful sound. "Tell these slatterns to let me go and face me like a man!"

The Master rounded on him, his lip twisting in contempt, but before he could reply a fresh wave of thought seemed to strike him and he lifted his head to speak to the thin air.

"Otto. Have any other intruders penetrated the base? This little scene has all been a diversion, the Doctor is still free somewhere."

"No, Master," Otto's calm tone filled the room. "All entrances are secure, no other intruders have been detected."

The Master's moment of violence dissipated as quickly as it had flared. He pondered Otto's response as if considering the menu for lunch.

"Hmm, intriguing move on the Doctor's part. Clearly he wanted my attention focused first on the robot, then on the impostor, but why, if he makes no attempt of his own? Something's happening. Something I'm missing."

He was silent for a moment longer, then turned to Alison, a broad smile suffusing his features, his white teeth flashing, his black eyes agleam.

"Oh, can you imagine how I would miss him if he were truly gone? When the game is won, we celebrate, but not without a trace of melancholy that it is over."

"You're not going to win this game," she returned, masking her churning fear with bravado. "The Doctor's been planning this for seven hundred years, what chance do you think you've got?"

He opened his mouth for a mocking reply, only to become suddenly still. His eyes flicked searchingly from side to side and Alison winced because she knew he'd seen it.

"Um... where's the robot?" he asked.

"It was left in the corner, Master," the serving girl who had been carrying it stated blandly.

"Yes," said the Master, with frightening patience. "Where is it now?"

She looked, and stood for a few moments looking blankly at the empty corner.

"It's not there," she said.

The Master's mouth thinned, and he whirled with sudden energy.

"Back to the control room!" he shouted. "Bring the prisoners!"

. . . . . . . . . .

The Doctor tapped carefully at the keys of a single panel in the vast, deserted, blinking and beeping expanse of the control room.

"Come on now," he murmured. "Come away from the dark side, you know it makes sense."

"I'm not really on a side," Otto responded in his quiet, melodious tone. "I'm a computer, I don't make choices based on..."

"Yes, actually that was a figure of speech. Talking nonsense helps me concentrate. Could you be quite, please?"

He was so immersed in what he was doing that he was only conscious of approaching footsteps the instant before the Master burst into the room.

"Ah ah ah!" the Doctor cautioned, leaping to his feet. "If we're going to be blown to bits, I'm sure we'd both prefer it to be together, but better still would be not getting blown to bits at all."

The Master's unreadable eyes rested on the Doctor's hand where it hovered over the energy flow safety override, and he rocked back on his heels, his hands hanging loosely by his sides. Seconds later the artificial young women came into view behind him, Alison, Tom and Nestor squirming in their immoveable grip.

"It appears we've reached an impasse," the Master said lightly. "Are you ready to watch the life squeezed from your friends' bodies?"

"Are you ready to give that order and watch me press this button?"

The two old enemies stood like chess grand masters eyeing one another across the board. Silence thickened in the room.


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter Twenty-One**

The Doctor, his finger poised and ready above the override switch, gave his familiar crooked smile.

"Fell for the old fake robot double bluff ploy. I'm surprised at you."

The Master eyed him from across the room as if he were a loose animal. Not a savage, dangerous animal, but one which might still give a nasty bite if not treated carefully.

"I was given to understand you'd regenerated."

"Yes, I know. Otherwise you'd have been more cautious about accepting that I was a broken android copy of my former self. A couple of strategically placed fireworks in the stitching of my coat was all it took to complete the effect."

The Master nodded thoughtfully.

"Good move, Doctor, good move. My foolish minions even carried you in past all the security screens. But unless I'm mistaken you've not had time to release the computer from my influence, so all this ingenuity has done you little good. Granted, you've freed the energy flow override, but let's talk sensibly. You're not really going to blow up this base and everyone in it."

"Why not? Better than letting you stay in control and use it to kill millions."

The Master nodded with a mocking little smile.

"Yes, yes. Very rational. Very utilitarian. But that's not you, is it Doctor? You can't look into the eyes of your friends while they are consumed by flames. You will always let these chances pass and search for a solution which hurts no one. This is why you lose."

The Doctor's smile faded and the tip of his long finger tapped the switch.

"Well, I do have another solution. One that hurts no one."

The Master looked politely interested.

"I'm all ears."

The Doctor leaned forward, a fresh intensity in his voice.

"Come with us! Travel in the TARDIS. Help us!"

Alison stared. This was a trick, surely? He wouldn't really? Not after... She looked at the Doctor's thin, serious face and her certainty wobbled. She tried to visualise them travelling with this man, pretending everything was the way it had been the day before, knowing he could turn on them any time he chose.

A low chuckle swirled round the room as the Master shook his head.

"This is your proposal? That I should take the android's place as your watchdog and lackey? Is this a joke? Did you seriously anticipate my enthusiastic acceptance?"

"Think about it." There was a note of pleading in the Doctor's voice. "Why do you do the things you do? Isn't it for the challenge? For the puzzle? For the achievement? That's what I'm offering you, the chance to pit your wits against the most dangerous enemies in the universe. Don't you want to prove you're cleverer than the Sontarans? Won't that be more satisfying than cruising around victimising helpless little primitive planets? And what's more, you won't have to do it alone, we can do it together and squabble about the best way. It'll be interesting, it'll be unpredictable. It'll be_ fun!_"

The Master had listened closely, his smile remaining but a little of the scorn fading away. When the Doctor done he shifted on his feet and did not reply immediately. When he did, his voice was quiet.

"Ah, Doctor. You're a clever man and you make a good argument. I might even be tempted but for one thing. I don't think I could bear to see the look of triumph on your face if I accepted, nor your look of paternal pride whenever I did something you considered good. No. All things considered, I think I'm happier as I am."

The Doctor's head lowered a little, his lips souring.

"You've chosen death."

"A threat, Doctor?"

"That's not what I meant."

The Master gave a condescending little roll of his eyes and shrugged the matter away.

"Moving on, then. My proposal is that you and your friends depart the installation and let me get on with what I'm doing. You will, at least, preserve your own lives, and may make a second attempt to stop me if you choose."

"Mm, and I'm sure you'd keep your word and let us leave after I took my finger off this button."

The Master smiled, relishing the stand-off.

"You have no option."

The Doctor paused, then glanced over the Master's shoulder where his companions stood pinned in the doorway. Alison met his eyes and read the question there. She nodded without thinking.

"Do it, Doctor, Wipe the smirk off his face."

"Yes, do it!" Tom agreed with passion. "You must stop these demons!"

"Better anything than let the terra-forming begin again," Nestor chipped in. "Oh, yes, better anything. That shouldn't be done here, definitely not."

The Doctor looked directly at the Master and smiled, a lively energy coming to his features.

"You see? This is why you lose."

His palm slammed down on the switch and the room shook, the lights intensifying to a dazzling glare. The artificially generated young women grasping the prisoners stiffened and then melted away like mist into the air. The metal floor plates rumbled under their feet and a thrumming roar shivered through the entire structure. Alison felt her very bones tremble and her stomach lurch with the intense vibrations running through her body.

The Master sighed lightly, a self-mocking irony in his gleaming eyes, and spoke with a nod which was almost a little bow.

"Interesting choice, Doctor, and one which I shall leave you to make the best of. Farewell. I hope and trust we will meet again."

He slipped away through a narrow side door with such polished stealth that he was gone before Alison was aware he was moving. She shook herself into action and ran to the Doctor's side.

"Where's he off to? Should we get after him?"

The Doctor had barely glanced at the Master's exit and was already leaning forward over the control panel, his eyes intent on the data swirling over the flickering, buzzing monitor.

"Oh, knowing him he memorised the location of the escape pods as soon as he arrived. We can't worry about him now."

"Is this place really going to blow up?"

"Mm." He nodded thoughtfully. "It's likely. Nestor!"

He beckoned the little man to his side.

"I need you to be ready with the restart codes for the system, understand?" The Doctor spoke sharply, not looking round, his fingers starting to crawl across the controls. "A split second late, and people for miles around will be picking bits of us out of their hair."

Nestor's mouth formed a circular "O" of concern and Alison swallowed worriedly. The thought that her survival was dependent on the memory and reaction time of this permanently bewildered little professor wasn't a happy one. She stood alongside Tom, who watched with a fixed expression of tightly-wound fear, almost envying his total lack of understanding of the peril they faced.

But the Doctor didn't flinch or hesitate. His quickened breathing was just barely perceptible in the rise and fall of his coat lapels as he spoke quiet, calm instructions to Nestor, his fingers a blur on the controls. Nestor seemed to draw strength from him and after a stumbling start he started to operate separate panels with some assurance, speeding up, even a trace of a smile on his face as his recollection of how to do this flooded back to him. The noise and vibration built steadily, individual instruments and controls bursting into spitting flame as they overloaded, but the work didn't cease. Alison felt the floor tremble under her boots until she was sure it would cave in beneath her. She squeezed her eyes shut, and then, hardly daring to believe it, felt the vibrations subside, just a little. The noise faded, the room settled, the painful brightness of the readouts in the control panels dimmed to normal.

Wisps of smoke rose from the machinery in the room. The Doctor stood back from the controls and straightened his coat. He looked over at her primly.

"I wasn't worried. Who said I was?"


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

"All right Nestor, just try to keep calm."

"I really don't think it's working, should I switch it off and switch it on again?"

"No. Give it another minute and we'll... all right, there it goes. You're on your way."

"Oh... I hope I have everything. Did I leave anything in your ship, Doctor?"

Nestor's worried voice rambled on. Alison watched the pub which was the sole visible manifestation of his vast technological research station start to flicker and fade. The Doctor, carefully controlling the operation through the time circuits of the TARDIS, adjusted his instruments with a light touch, the time vortex he had assured the others he could create drawing the installation back in time to the point of its original arrival on Earth.

"Now remember," he instructed. "You have to put every one of those people back at the points in history where you found them. You can't dump a sentient being seven hundred years outside his own time and expect him to pick up his life where he left off."

"I know Doctor," Nestor affirmed meekly. "Thanks again. Hope you..."

He was gone. Alison found herself giving a wistful sigh. As trying as he'd been, she would miss him just a little. Still, it warmed her to recall the look on Tom Mason's face when she had told him he would be going home, back to his hard, poor, but safe and honest life.

The Doctor checked the readings one more time and turned to face her, looking pleased with himself.

"They may have a bit of a bumpy ride, but they'll get there. It's lucky they already had basic temporal technology for the stasis pods."

"What about the Master?" she asked. "Where do you think he'll go?"

She didn't miss the shadow which passed across the Doctor's face, but he answered carelessly.

"Well, the escape capsules were rigged for interstellar travel, apparently, so I think he'll head for the site of the Gorro Amari space station. Theoretically his TARDIS should still be intact amongst the debris." He shrugged, looking away. "If he can retrieve it then he'll be free to do as he likes."

The Doctor was still for a moment, then visibly shook himself free of the thoughts threatening to cloud his mind. He straightened, turning back to the console.

"So. Where shall we go next? There's a great big universe to explore out there."

"Well... I was going to go and visit my mum, remember?"

He didn't turn from his examination of the dials.

"So you were. All right, how long were you thinking? Couple of hours?"

Alison hesitated, all the phrases she had thought of, all the different ways of putting it, fleeing away and leaving her mind barren. She felt invisible hands pressing in upon her, suffocating her, and when she opened her mouth the words tumbled out clumsily of their own accord.

"Actually..." She took a deep breath. "I was thinking... I was thinking I might stay a day or two or... you know... maybe longer."

Stiff and miserable she watched his fingers splay out on the console top as his shoulders bent forward and his weight pressed down upon them. With each second that crept past she wished more that she had never said it. When the Doctor spoke, his voice was little more than a murmur, perfectly calm and businesslike.

"You're sure?"

"Yes, I..."

That was untrue, she wasn't. Or was she? She wasn't sure if she was sure. The certainty that she was right, the strength of the pull drawing her home, didn't make this hurt any less.

"I'm sorry," she managed awkwardly. "It's just..." She clawed at the words that circled through her mind. "It's just... I've already said goodbye to you once. I can't do it again."

Slowly, his foot dragging against the floor, he turned to face her. He didn't look that displeased. His face was pale, but then it always was. Stiff but, again, it always was.

"Go, then," he said.

Alison stood in the centre of an expanse of floor which seemed suddenly impossibly vast, the distance which separated her from him beyond all imagining.

"Is there anything you want to take with you?" he asked quietly.

She could barely speak. She felt as if there was a block of iron wedged in her throat. At that instant she only wished she could take back what she had said, run to him and ask him where they were going next, but it was far, far too late.

"No," she managed to say in a small voice. "Goodbye, Doctor."

He reached behind him to operate the door control and the exit hummed open behind her. He watched her hovering there in the doorway for a few moments, framed by the swaying green of the woods. His expression remained rigid but with great precision he spoke a few careful words.

"I will miss you, Alison. I'm glad we met."

Her features crumpled and tightened as she struggled to hold her composure and her jaw muscles worked as she struggled to make a reply.

"It's all right," he said. "As you said, we have already said goodbye once today. It's enough."

She managed to nod, and backed away, out of the TARDIS, her heart raging at her that she was making a terrible, terrible mistake that she would regret all her life. She stared in through the doors at the Doctor turning his back on her and bowing over the controls and was an instant away from calling out to him when the doors swung shut in her face.

Alison no longer held back the tears which streamed down her cheeks as the familiar unearthly groan of the TARDIS' engines rose and engulfed her, and the strange old blue police box faded away and out of her life, forever.

She slumped to the grass, her legs giving way beneath her, and sat bowed where she was with her whole life ahead of her. A life of normal things, of relationships and work and everyday problems, and saving up for things and tiny victories and defeats. It was what she wanted. It was. You couldn't live a dream forever, there came a time to wake up. But normality, she knew, would never be the same again.

. . . . . . . . . .

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor stood for a long time, staring at the rise and fall of the console column with hard, unseeing eyes. At last he blinked, and looked around him with a vague air of confusion.

"Hm," he said, his voice loud in the silence. "I'd forgotten how big this place is."

He glanced at a doorway leading into the body of the craft, and as though he did not see that door every day, the sight flashed up a memory of gazing at that door once before, and of the voice which had interrupted his thoughts:

"So, Doctor. I suppose you'll be wanting to keep her."

The Doctor had looked for a moment longer at the door through which Alison had disappeared on a wide-eyed exploration of the ship, then glanced over at the Master.

"Even if I did, who's to say she'd want to come?"

The Master had rolled his eyes.

"For a clever man, Doctor, you can be awfully dim."

The Doctor frowned, but let it pass with a shrug.

"All right, I'm tempted. But you know my feelings on picking up humans again. After what happened to Jasmine..."

"Come now. What are the chances of that happening again? Specially now that I'll be here to keep an eye on you both."

"Even then..." The Doctor leaned back against the console, reluctantly finding that once again the Master had got him talking. "Humans, they come with me, then they leave. Another one comes along, I get to know them, then they leave as well. Every time, it happens. I'm asking myself if it's worth the pain, you understand? Well no, of course you don't."

The Master drew air in pointlessly through his artificial nostrils as he made a show of mulling this over.

"Do you remember back in the old UNIT days, there was an affair in a village called Clootsbridge?"

"I remember you'd disguised yourself as a Swedish doctor so that you could pretend to be researching herbal remedies when in fact you were drawing blood from the townsfolk to isolate the DNA of the aliens who'd landed there four hundred years earlier and interbred with the locals."

"Ah, yes." The Master smiled reminiscently. "I did a very good Swedish accent, if I say so myself. Anyway, you'll recall that I was lodging with an old lady who whilst not running a boarding house used to run a sanctuary for sick and injured otters?"

The Doctor folded his arms sceptically.

"I just know you're about to explain why this is relevant."

"The point is, she would take these little creatures in, and tend them, and feed them, and play with them, and grow fond of them. But there came a time when they were recovered and it was time to release them into the wild."

"Can I just make it clear that I don't accept the humans as pets analogy?"

"Duly noted, but bear with me. You see, I watched with some interest the process of releasing one of these charming animals. The old lady would take it down to the river with tears in her eyes, murmuring soothing words into its basket. She was quite distraught, and I asked myself why, in that case, she didn't simply keep the creature and give it a safe, comfortable life in her home rather than let it face an uncertain future out in the wild."

The Doctor listened in silence, his brows drawing thoughtfully together.

"But what I came to realise," the Master went on, "was that for all the distress the process brought her, it also brought her great joy. Watching the creature swim away, strong and healthy, back into its natural habitat was the greatest happiness in the old lady's life. She picked these creatures up when they were wounded in some way, and with her kindness and protection she healed them of whatever hurt they had suffered. When they were gone, she missed them, but she celebrated the fact that they were strong enough now to live without her."

The Doctor pondered the story, and allowed a slight smile to tug at his lips.

"You're a sentimental old softie underneath, aren't you?"

The Master nodded.

"Amongst other things."

**THE END**


End file.
